OMO: Terrible Twos.

The OMO 2nd birthday celebration is on Saturday night at the Jublilee Hotel with DJs Shame, Dud and Athol

After two years, several locations and a shit load of booty shaking funk delights, monthly queer and alternative night OMO has finally found a new home. From early days at Double Helix and onto the seedy glory of Mantra, OMO founders Keith Duddy (Dud) and Shane Garvey aka Shame have trundled on to the greener pastures of the Jubilee Hotel alongside third Love Machine Corporation collective entity David Clarke who does all the design and creative things for OMO. OMO is now a monthly venture that will marry music, art and performance in a cool, light-hearted way. Over fine wines and beers in West End, the following was salvaged from my drunken recordings.

You met and started O.M.O how?

Keith: “We met at Fringe Festival things in the early 90’s, Shane was on the board. The first idea came from a Y2K party we did.”

Shame: “We’d thrown a big party in the Blue Mountains, we know a lot of people so we do a bush doof every year, so we had a party and we were keen to do something else.”

Keith: “We were like driving back to Brisbane and wondering where we wanted to go out it was like ‘Oh shit, we have to start something else!” We were bored with everything else happening in the gay scene in Brisbane.”

Shame: “It was all kind of the same mainstream music, and we were finding people were going out cause they had no where else to go. Initially we wanted to do something on a week night.”

Keith: “So we started going out on week nights, purely for research purposes!”

Shame: “We knew the people that were opening Double Helix, so we put in a proposal and started doing Thursday nights just to se what happens… this was two years ago. The opening had three hundred people!”

Shame: “The project was to play really good funky music and to see where art can inform the public experience and whether the public experience can inform art, that’s what we started with.” 

Keith: “Every week, we had a performance of some sort, and we have always been intertwined with the arts community… we always did silly stuff, like cabaret, people hanging upside down bleeding in the corner…”

Shame: “Me showing my genitals…”

Keith: “What we always said is that it a club for all our friends and we have gay friends… I mean we wanted to have a queer night for us but we don’t want to make it exclusive.”

Shame: “I mean, some of my closets friends are heterosexual…”