Pete Birch, one half of DJ duo Digs & Woosh and co-founder of Nottingham collective DiY Soundsystem, passed away on October 2nd. He had suffered from a head and neck cancer with which he had been diagnosed in December 2015.
Birch was one of the core personalities in DiY Soundsystem, who held their first official event in November 1989. The group became a mainstay of Nottingham club nights and festivals, eventually expanding their brand to include a record label called Strictly 4 Groovers in 1993 that would rebrand as DiY Discs in 1998.
“After a lifetime of DJing, drug taking, and bad lifestyle choices the news hardly came as a surprise,” said Birch at the time of his cancer diagnosis, according to Big Shot. He opted to pursue holistic remedies to treat his ailment.
In March of 2019, Birch started a series called 52 Card Trick in which he would release songs by different artists for 52 weeks through the Bandcamp account for his Spirit Wrestlers brand. Proceeds went to Nottingham charity Active Cancer Therapy Support as well as Together Against Cancer in Leicester and the Penny Brohn Centre in Bristol.
No details of a memorial have been disclosed to the public by the family and friends of Pete “Woosh” Birch at the time of writing.
Image credit: Tom Morley for LeftLion
