Pure Pacha’s 9th Birthday @Pacha London

So Pacha London celebrated its 9th Birthday this Saturday, and what a Birthday it was! Even though it was early January, crowds were out in force.

I have to admit it’s been years since I was last at Pacha. My memories of it are of it as one of London’s superclubs, all shiny and new and glamorous, with beautiful girls and handsome men all clubbing like crazy to the Pacha House groove, and looking good doing it.

Fast forward to today: the crowd are just as lovely, the tunes are just as slick, and the club… hasn’t changed a bit. You can see this as a good thing or a bad thing, but at least the DJs haven’t stopped moving things forward.

The DJs almost universally pushed the envelope of what you might think of as the Pacha sound. The music was uniformly danceable, accessible, and energising, but it had a harder, more driving edge than I was expecting. This was a good thing – a very good thing, and the Read the Crowd DJs Tommy Rogers and Lee Dagger did a great job, progressively moving into a bigger and bigger room sound as the night progressed.

By the time Gainsford came on at around 3am the crowd were flagging slightly from the pace. But when a DJ gets it just right, all the energy comes back into the room in no time flat – and that’s exactly what happened. Everyone was totally spent by the time he stepped back from the decks and turned things over to So Called Scumbags and Jade Cox.

The standout moment for the entire night had to be when Gainsford dropped a remix of Florence and the Machines You’ve Got the Love, but unlike any of the hundreds you’ve heard circulating on the Hype Machine. We’ve tracked it down, and while it’s currently unreleased you can listen to a sample.

Just Lovely. Enjoy.