On the subject of the Sub Club, Richy Ahmed is full of superlatives. He loves – loves – playing there. “I’d play there every week if I could.

It’s tremendous,” he tells me from Shoreditch House as he scuttles around in search of a quiet corner.

The Tynesider is in London for meetings and a brief period of chill – “catching up on work that doesn’t entail mixing music, y’know?” – but his thoughts are firmly on his next Glasgow gig, tonight at the famous Jamaica Street basement.

“It’s just an amazing place to play,” he says, the enthusiasm palpable in his thick Geordie brogue. “My favourite small club, far and away. The crowds in Glasgow and in the Subbie are brilliant.

“They’re a very knowledgeable crowd: they’re young, but they know their tunes. I’ll go to Glasgow and I know I can play anything in front of them.

"I love house, but I think I’m known for playing a lot of different types of music. I play everything from house, techno, disco, electronic: I’ll put it on.

“There aren’t many crowds that are like the ones in Glasgow, if I’m honest. When I play here, I try to make it go off. That’s just what I like doing, you know? I get a buzz off it. It’s a match made in heaven: the crowds love it and I love it.”

Ahmed remembers vividly his first experience of the notoriously keen Glasgow audience.

“The first gig I had in Glasgow was at Saint Judes, for Glasgow City Social Club,” he says. “It went off in there, mate. It was a proper small, sweaty room and it was like a scene off Braveheart. [Sub Club resident] Jasper James played before us, and we went for a full English breakfast straight after it. It was brilliant.”

What makes it so particularly manic, here, though? “I think part of the reason is that the clubs close early,” says Ahmed. “The sound in the Subbie is great, it gets full quickly, there’s no waiting two or three hours for it to get warmed up. Every time I’ve played, it has been rammed by 11pm and they’re banging on the ceilings at quarter past.”

Ahmed is best known for his work with Hot Creations, the wildly popular, independent British label that specialises in radio-friendly house inflected with disco and techno. But he recently branched out from the stable by launching his own imprint, FourThirtyTwo. Having his own label allows him to champion tracks that perhaps don’t suit Hot Creations’ singular style.

“Some people [start their own] labels because they need some sort of way to boost their profile,” he says, “but I didn’t really need that. My profile got big through DJing. It was more that I wanted to do something that I had complete creative control over, rather than having to share that control with different DJs.”

He only launched FourThirtyTwo late last year, but there are a handful of exciting releases in the pipeline. “I’ve got a new EP coming out from an artist I’ve signed called Jansons, who’s amazing,” he says. “I’ve just done a sick remix for it. Then we’ve got a release from Man Power after that. Then we’ve got my EP, then a few others that I don’t want to say too much about.

“I’m trying to do all-vinyl, full artwork, picture sleeves, only doing four or five releases per year, emphasising quality over everything else.”

Ahmed has also been playing all night at a series of parties under the FourThirtyTwo banner that, almost predictably, have been well received. “I’ve got a lot more variation in the music I can play,” he says. “I’ve got a lot more time to experiment. I’ll take chances in a FourThirtyTwo party that I won’t at a Hot Creations party. I can set the tone, I can take a risk, I can make a mess of it or take it in a weird direction for thirty minutes and it doesn’t matter as much – sometimes I’ve got an eight-hour set to get it back. So that full artistic control is good.”

Fans who turn up expecting a Hot Creations vibe won’t be left cold by the change of tack, though. “They know I like variation – that’s what I like to do. For a gig like this I’ll play hour-to-hour. I’ll start off playing some deep house, maybe some soulful house, more vocal stuff, move onto disco, take in a bit of minimal, go rolling into techno, then finish with disco, more banging stuff. Sometimes I’ll just go hard the whole time. You never know.

“But what I do know: I’ve got a really big old playlist when I do a FourThirtyTwo show and I’ll use it all. In Glasgow, you’ve only got four hours – you need to make the most of them.”

• Richy Ahmed, tonight, Sub Club, 11pm – 3am, £10

Photo caption: Hot Creations mainstay Richy Ahmed flies solo at the Subbie tonight under his new FourThirtyTwo banner.