- Lately, Glasgow's dance floors haven't felt like the restless souls they once were. In a climate where dubstep has faded from memory, familiar house and techno lineups have ossified on billboards. That's not to say Glasgow doesn't have variety, but the parties where the music is a little more unorthodox tend to happen on the fringes (Konx-Om-Pax, for example, runs an occasional hardcore, breakbeat and jungle night called 48k in a lawn bowls club). La Cheetah is a place with a foot in both camps: month-by-month, the Queen Street basement pulls in blockbuster house and techno DJs, plus lesser-known guests and the occasional experimental artist.
Levon Vincent was billed for the first of three birthday parties for the club (Theo Parrish and Matthew Herbert are scheduled to play the others). The youthful Offbeat trio, who run a regular night at La Cheetah, began the evening by throwing the kitchen sink at it, followed by the boiler and the worktops. They played good-to-great records and were fun to watch, but at no stage did it feel like the music was going to veer toward Vincent's (admittedly singular) vibe. After Offbeat finished with Severed Heads' "Dead Eyes Opened," Vincent stepped into the booth and sharply drew the curtain on them. Instead of mixing in his first record, he simply stopped what was playing and brought in something much slower and deeper. His first hour had a real warmth about it—much more so than some recent festival sets I've seen him play. The basslines were bold, the synths uplifting—it was as if he'd tailored his record bag's contents specially for La Cheetah's low ceilings and snug spaces.
If you'd been at the back of the club or in a spot where the booth was out of sight, you wouldn't have had any idea that Vincent was a little pissed off. At one point he threw an amusingly accusatory glance at a skipping needle, as if it'd just called him a rude name under its breath. He dealt with it calmly and without fuss, but it seemed to put him off enjoying himself. Wardy, the club's main resident and programmer, took over from Vincent for the last hour to thrash out a pacier set of house and techno selections. Robert Hood's own "Never Grow Old" remix, which has given one of last year's best tracks a fresh set of legs, and a version of Blaze's "Lovelee Dae" whipped up the crowd anew, who by then had forgiven the night's occasional bout of hiccups.