“Self-taught and self-built”: DJ Petchy’s Soul Sure is part of the backbone of London’s party scene

Petch played his first gig when he was 16, so his mum and aunty had to chaperone him. “I’ve done this party and everyone’s going crazy. This woman came up to me and said she wanted to book me to play in Berlin. I sent her over to my mum,” he explains. Sadly, they lost the woman’s number, but the experience was enough to spur Petchy on and he soon started getting stuck into London’s club scene as a raver, while also picking up gigs here and there. “By the time I got to 18, I’m a raver. That’s it, I’m outside. You ain’t getting me inside. My mum used to call me ‘Streetwalker’,” he quips. “There was nothing really much more to life for us. The music that was our thing. So we raved everywhere; we was in Ministry, then we was up in Birmingham. Wherever we could go to see people like Jamie Jones, Dennis Ferrer, people who just blew my mind.” Being out all the time, and naturally gregarious and sociable, Petchy began to organically build a social network. “It got to the point where everyone we knew would be calling me up asking: ‘Where’s the party?!’. I’d be getting so many calls every week,” Petch tells us. One day he suggested doing a party of his own to his raving partner Sam (“His real name is Ben, but we call him Sam”). Initially, Sam pooh-poohed the idea, but a little while later, Petch brought it up again and this time he agreed.

By this point, Petchy had secured a slot on LiveFM, so he had the power of radio, as well as his connections across London’s party circuit. “So I just started calling a bunch of people we knew, and I said, ‘Listen, I’m having a party, tell your friend, and bring that one from that party and this one from there’. I must have made about 250 phone calls to everyone, rave-related, who was in my phonebook,” he explains. With his birthday on the horizon, Petch was able to add another incentive to the party invites. The first event in 2008 brought over 150 people. From there, the magic of social connections led to a few events at The Driver in King’s Cross in 2009, before a mate hooked him up with a Friday night slot at Pacha in Victoria. “We went from that one party, when we didn’t know nothing, to The Driver, that was probably about 300 people, and straight into Pacha,” he tells us. “We were at Pacha, doing an early incarnation of Soul Sure called Just Beats, for three years. We sold it out every single month, we were doing better than Hed Kandi.”

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Throughout our interview Petchy’s magnetic personality and natural storytelling is at full power and demonstrates why he’s been able to bring together so many people at his parties over the last 16 years. He’s a very likeable, engaging character, which is just what you need if you’re going to convince people to party with you. That energy pulsates through Soul Sure, where the crowd is diverse and inherently local. At Soul Sure’s Easter party Mixmag experiences the whole night, with notorious selectors such as G Smallz, Morgan Black, Tashwayy Sounds and MCs Tippa, Gemini, Fro and Dark Man Zulu, plus Petchy back-to-back with Wigman. A mix of soulful and funky house, a bit of garage and, largely, amapiano, is what you’ll hear at the event these days. The grassroots nature of the party is also reflected in the crowd, which appears more working class than a typical night out in Hackney Wick. Older ravers rub shoulders with the younger generation, all united on the dancefloor for the love of house music. It’s one pocket of London’s club culture that rarely gets reported on. Soul Sure comes under the same umbrella as parties like Foundation, founded by Mark Radford, Lee ‘B3’ Edwards and Lance Morgan, or Trafik Jam, hosted by Soul Sure regular Angie B, Morgan Black’s Da Dungeon, Supa D’s The Originals and House Passion, among many others. These parties form the backbone of the city’s club culture, founded, and run by, born and raised Londoners.