Like most high school pupils in this country, I studied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in English class. Unlike most of my peers, I didn’t hate it. In fact, I had to lie about how much I enjoyed it. It was one of the first pieces of great American literature I encountered. But to try and maintain the thin and fragile veneer of cool I was developing, I covered up my admiration for Fitzgerald’s flawless phrasing with pretend boredom, and joined in the with the eye-rolling when we had to dissect Daisy’s dialogue. I think I just about got away with it.

A decade later, everything was flipped on its head. When Leonardo DiCaprio played the titular character in Baz Luhrmann’s critically-panned film version, it made dressing up in aristocratic 1920s clothes and dancing around to swing music cool again. If you had tried that a year earlier, you would have looked like a Club Noir frequenter and been rightly shunned by society. But almost as soon as Leo’s depiction of the bold Jay and his lavish Saturday night parties hit the cinema, it inspired a fresh wave of Charleston-popping, feather boa-brandishing club nights: from the Flying Duck to the GUU, they were everywhere.

“It’s like an amusement park,” says Toby Maguire, playing the book’s narrator Nick Carraway, agog at the decadent behaviour going on around him. It’s this funfair vibe that the Party Like Gatsby promoters are going for as they take their retro extravaganza on the road around Europe: scattered around the warehouse are dancers, circus artists, DJs and bands. There are no big-name DJs, and it might be a little on the wrong side of corny, but guests will encounter an eye-popping movable feast of entertainment. If that’s your thing, go for it.

A greater contrast between two events at the same venue on subsequent nights would be difficult to find. If tomorrow night is all about dressed-up Roaring Twenties opulence, Saturday is a night for stripped-down, bleeding-edge improvised techno. The celebrated English duo Karenn (made up of in-demand DJs Blawan and Pariah) use only analogue equipment and they craft their sets live as they go along. The result is a tense, grinding display of raw, tough techno the likes of which you won’t hear anywhere else. Nobody’s saying it’s easy listening, but the payoff is in experiencing it live and knowing that it won’t be repeated.

Legendary house label Defected are bringing their In the House series of parties to the venue’s TV studio at the very same time. White Isle fixture Sam Divine supplies the deep, vocal and Balearic beats for her long-term collaborators: “‘I’ve always supported Defected,” she said recently. “It’s been my sound since day one and I’m so honoured and grateful to be part of the house music legacy they’ve created.” The hardworking Dutchmen Franky Rizardo and Man Without A Clue (total misnomer, he knows exactly what he’s doing) will also be dropping sets full of slick, popular house bangers, while locals Raeside and Vilmos get things going.

• Party Like Gatsby, tomorrow, SWG3, 8pm – late, £34.50

• Karenn (live), Saturday, SWG3, 10.30pm – 3am, £12

• Defected in the House, Saturday, SWG3, 9pm – 3am, £19.50

Optimo

Through their anti-racism raves, food bank fundraisers and their work with the Autonomous Africa project, Optimo duo JD Twitch and JG Wilkes have established themselves at the forefront of Scotland’s socially-conscious club scene. Their third annual food bank appeal takes place tomorrow night: Chicago house icon The Black Madonna (aka Marea Stamper) headlines, all profits will go to help the city’s most disadvantaged people from going hungry. Stamper and Optimo share much of the same ground musically and politically: they’re liberal, open-minded, progressive, and scornful of genre constraints. “A really big turning point in my life was the last Optimo party at Sub Club,” she told Resident Advisor recently. “They broadcast it over the internet... I remember laying in my bed alone and sobbing into my hands because this place existed, it was proof, proof of life." Something tells me that she and the crowd tomorrow night are going to click quite nicely.

• Optimo with The Black Madonna, tomorrow, Sub Club, 11pm – 4am, £15

Melting Pot

Glasgow’s Al Kent is the special guest at Saturday night’s Melting Pot. A lifetime of hoarding obscure rare groove records means he’s a particularly on-point choice for this last hurrah of 2016. The man described by Joey Negro as “Scotland’s answer to Walter Gibbons” is rounding off yet another killer year for the homegrown disco dons, who are aging less like a fine wine than a Macallan 1946.

• Melting Pot with Al Kent, Saturday, The Admiral, 11pm – 3am, £8