There’s a common thread amongst people my age who come to a country like Vietnam to work as an English teacher. Usually, we’re looking for a change: a change of scenery from past surroundings, a change of work from a past career, or a change from an old life into a newer one, into something we believe could be better. When I came to Saigon back in the summer of 2022, I didn’t know anyone. This was exactly the type of change I’d been looking for. Since then, three years have passed. I’ve made new friends, started jiu jitsu, adopted a cat, then another one, and been here long enough to see hopeful, would-be English teachers come and go, as if the change they’d come for hadn’t been the one they’d wanted. Throughout it all, I’ve thought about life before Saigon every now and again, and always felt an immeasurable distance between what had been and what now was. I had changed, I had gotten what I’d come for—more than that—but right when you start believing your past and present are disconnected, that they happen in spite of each other rather than because of each other, something or someone comes along to remind you that no matter how much you change, you remain, inside, who you once were.
Max Pettifer made the move to Vietnam in early 2025. Saigon’s a long way from Dover, where he was born, and it’s an even longer way from Falmouth, a seaside town in the south of England where we met in university. Why, then, did he make the move? What change was he looking for? To answer those questions, you’ve got to go back to when he was a teenager.
Max began playing piano at the age of 13. The reason he started, however, wasn’t because of any special desire to play the instrument. His parents got him to start, but as is the case whenever your parents make you do something as a teen, there’s a likelihood you’re not going to enjoy it—In fact, most times you’ll swing in the opposite direction. A year later, Max stopped. Instead, he bought a bass guitar and started a band with his friends. They called themselves Engram, which means fragment of a memory and it’s this period playing in a band with his friends that he describes as one of the funnest anybody can experience in a lifetime. They played anything from Hendrix to Oasis, and had a tendency to end their songs on the G Chord just so they could go right into Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird solo. It’s that sort of playful, let’s-do-whatever-we-want attitude that characterised Engram. They did a number of shows at school but their largest was a 300 person show at a charity event for Breast Cancer Awareness. Despite what appeared to be endless fun, it could only last so long. The band broke up before university, each going their separate way. Despite his love of music, Max figured he’d be better off studying something more pragmatic, which is why he decided on majoring in English. It was because of this decision, I met him at Falmouth.
University, if you do it right, should be something of a blur. That might be silly to say and any parent reading this might hate the idea but I believe if there’s any time in your life to make mistakes and go a little over the top, it’s university. I met Max during my first week at Falmouth, owing to the fact that we lived on the ground floor of neighbouring dorms. We soon discovered that if you opened the windows to our rooms, you could step out onto a narrow passage hidden at the bottom of a small embankment. It was there we often met for morning coffees and a smoke, chit chatting about this and that, nursing a hangover and debating whether we should go to class. A friendship was born, and it wasn’t long before we discovered an appreciation of the similar type of music. We both, however, we’re getting turned onto the same kind of electronic music at the same time: House music by DJ’s like Mall Grab, Ross From Friends, and Folamour. By then I knew DJing was something Max had an interest in, and that he already knew his way around a mixer and how to properly mix tracks into one another. However, and perhaps most importantly, he just loved music, which meant that he had an extensive range of songs in his arsenal which he could pick from for his sets. So began a period of three years in university where Max and another of our friends, Noah, DJ’d at house parties. In a way he was reliving that fun, carefree period he’d had as a teenager with Engram, playing just for the sake of it, playing just because it was what he wanted to do.
Upon graduating, he moved back to Dover. He still DJ’d but nothing really clicked until he went to Sunwaves Festival in Romania in 2023. There were no set times for DJ’s meaning the music never switched off, and it was this experience that made him want to really start DJing more seriously. From that point forward Max made it a point to discover his own unique style, something he describes today with equal parts irony and seriousness as hypnotic ambient with an underlying minimal groove. Basically, think anything by Skee Mask. From Dover he moved to London where he managed a pub in Central Victoria. Life, at that point, was relatively straight forward: working at the pub most evenings and when he got back home, DJing in his flat. He had a gig here and there but Covid resulted in most opportunities drying up. At this point, Max started feeling a little too comfortable with life in England. I recall in university how he always spoke of his dreams of seeing Asia, and by then I had already moved and settled in Saigon, not to mention another friend of ours from university, Callum, had recently made the move. Why wait any longer? In May 2025, he booked a one-way flight to Bangkok with the intention of ending his travels in Vietnam. Along the way he joined a pool team, blew his budget in two weeks, DJ’d in Thailand’s resident hippie town of Pai, clubbed at Savage, Mirage, and Unmute in Hanoi before making his way through Ha Long Bay, Cat Ba, Ninh Binh, and finally, hopping on a train to Saigon. When he arrived he only had fifty pounds so he needed money—Fast.
Having known Max for almost a decade now, one aspect I believe sums him up is a complete, occasionally blind willingness to say, why not? Why not start a band with friends instead of playing the piano like your parents want you to? Why not start DJing in university, even though it’s not like anyone ever taught you how? Once he made it to Saigon, another one of those why not’s popped up. After travelling the country and ending up broke, he thought to himself: why not just stay here, make some money teaching English, then figure out what to do after that? In true Max fashion, why not was indeed the answer.
Since he’s arrived, Max has stayed true to his promise of DJing as much as possible. One thing he loves about the city is how easy it is to connect with like-minded people, so it wasn’t long before he’d gotten to know several others in Saigon’s electronic music scene, among them an artist, Dano, otherwise known by his DJ name, Mooseman. So far Max has played at The Observatory, Bondrunk, Broma, and Bar Commune, but he’s really only just getting started. As of writing this in late June, Max is back in England for his younger brother’s wedding, but he’s aiming to be back in September with his mixing setup from home and a few tracks of his own. Who know what will happen when he comes back. He could stay a year, two, or maybe he’ll be off on another adventure someplace new. Whatever happens, I know he’ll always have the same answer for his choices. It’s your life, after all, so why not?
- Follow Max
