Lady Shaka is the past, present, and future of Pasifika club music

Before she was Lady Shaka, the global DJ superstar selling out clubs around the world, Lady Shaka was Shakaiah Perez, a queer identifying young girl of Samoan, Tokelauan, Tahitian, Māori, and Cape Verdean heritage, repping West Auckland and Central Tāmaki Makaurau as her home. So much more than just a DJ, Shaka is a storyteller through music and movement, using her multi-disciplinary artistry as a vessel to honour her ancestors, reflecting the past, present, and future of her identity as a femme queen and member of the Pacific Island, Indigenous Māori diaspora.

Lady Shaka is Mixmag Australia / NZ’s April 2025 Cover Artist.

Prior to picking up the decks for the first time in 2018, Shaka’s childhood was deeply immersed in the world of dance, where she would lay her foundation to intertwine artforms and weave together the practices that would one day become synonymous with a quintessential Lady Shaka set. When she was eight years old, she joined her first hip-hop dance crew at school alongside Kirsten Dodgen, the prolific it-girl dancer of ReQuest dance crew fame. During a school talent show at Richmond Road Primary school, where she danced and lip synced to Beyonce’s ‘Crazy In Love’, Shaka was scouted by a dance agency and went on to perform at iconic Aotearoa events like Christmas In The Park as a child.

From there, she went on to learn styles of dance including tap dance, Latin American, ballroom, Bollywood, and more. Always intrinsically connected to other indigenous cultures, she was yet to know that all of these respective styles of dance would one day also become integral facets of the diverse melting pot of global club genres that today pulse through Lady Shaka’s DJ sets.

“The first proper dance crew I was in that did well was this crew called De Ja Vu, which was a part of Dziah Dance Academy, out in Otara. At the time, they were the top dance crew in the country, and we were the first junior crew to make it to the finals, where we came fourth in the world,” Shaka recalls. “I was 11 years old, going to Las Vegas to compete, which was insane.

The year after I joined Sorority, which is a part of Parris Goebel’s Royal Family dance crew. We came third in the teenage section when I was 13. The following year, I went back with my mum, who had managed to get some money together to come over because we knew that we had a chance to actually come first. And we did - and that was my little journey to becoming a world hip-hop gold medalist.”

Going from choreographing the stage as a dancer to choreographing the entire club as a DJ, Lady Shaka’s transition from dancer to DJ began two years into her first stint living in London back in 2018, where she downloaded virtual DJ and pulled together a quick set for her own leaving party once her first working visa was due to expire.

“Straight after that, I came back to Aotearoa, and Afrodaze was just starting up. I played my first ever gig in the club at Afrodaze, with my laptop, and there was this moment where there was silence in the club, and I felt so bad,” she laughs. “And then I played my very first FILTH club night, which was their first ever volume at Whammy Bar… And the rest is history.”

But finding her place as an artist wasn’t always that effortless for Shaka, and despite all the success of her childhood dance journey, when she moved to London to pursue a career in dance at 20-years-old, there were many more obstacles in her way than there were wins. An old high school teacher connected her with her first London flat sub lease in 2016, but other than that, she arrived in the city with no friends, no job locked in, and nothing but a dream to make a living through dance.

“At that point, I knew nobody, so it was really scary,” Shaka remembers. “I actually planned my first day in London to be the day of Notting Hill Carnival, and I met this girl there that was a friend of a friend. So we went together, and that was cute. And then my best friend to this day, I met her during that same week.

I lived in South London, and then I had to find somewhere else to live once my sublease ran out. I went to this house viewing, 60 people turned up, and the house was taken. I said to the agent, can you please help me? I need somewhere to live by tomorrow or I’m gonna be homeless. Eventually I was able to find a place, and I was working at this shitty job. I thought I would be able to find a good job in London, because back in Aotearoa I worked at Youthline, as a youth worker. But I ended up working at a company called Deliveroo, which is like Ubereats, and I was in the call center. I fucking hated it,” she recalls.

After months of grinding and building her connections from the ground up at dance classes and community workshops, Shaka finally scored her first major dance gig in the UK, where she toured a theatre show around the country. But it wasn’t until her second stint living in the UK in 2019 that she landed her biggest gig yet - when she was handpicked to be Manchester-based rapper IAMDDB's in-house DJ and hype woman.

“I saw on Instagram that she was looking for a female DJ, and she was running auditions,” Shaka reflects on the experience. “Then two months later, I get this message saying, hey, we're doing auditions, and we want you to come through”.

I got all dressed up and went to this audition. The first song I played was ‘Badman Forward Badman Pull Up‘ by Ding Dong, and then I mixed it with a Spice track. IAMDDB screamed and ran up, because I was whining while I was playing the song. And she just lost her shit. Her and her friends were hollering and twerking while I was auditioning, and I felt so bad because all the other girls who were yet to audition were watching,” Shaka laughs. “We did lots of festivals together, and it was beautiful. But unfortunately it ended really abruptly.”

The pair's professional relationship ending turned out to be a blessing in disguise and divine redirection, because after Shaka’s Boiler Room debut at the FILTH x Boiler Room event in Aotearoa in March 2021, she was quickly ascending into her destined position as the headline star, as opposed to a background DJ in the shadow of another artist. “I truly believe it was a blessing in disguise,” Shaka agrees. “Because the day after I found out, I got my first Europe booking, and that same week, I got asked to DJ a Stella Mccartney party. If I was still touring with her, I would’ve had to turn all of those opportunities down.”

With the 2019 formation of her platform Pulotu Underworld, a global collective based in Aotearoa and the UK celebrating Pacific music, culture and artistry, Shaka manifested exactly the space and community she once needed back when she first moved to the UK in 2016.

“The idea started when I was a part of a collective called Interisland, which is a Pacific Island arts collective based in London. At the time we had this amazing space at an art gallery. We were having a drink one night with all the aunties. And I was like, I want to run a club night for all of us.

One of the aunties, his name’s Lyle, he runs this place called Vogue Fabrics, which is quite prominent in the queer community in East London, and so many events have started off in their basement. And he told me to come use his venue. So we did, and we had our very first Pulotu Underworld event there. And it was fab, just being like, oh my god, we finally started something for us out here. We had myself, allyXpress, who’s a Samoan UK-based DJ, and Thomas Rose for the first event, and it just kept growing from there.”

The first Pacific club night of its kind in the UK, Pulotu Underworld began as an idea to create events for and by the UK's Pacific Island community, as a way of connecting the huge community of Pacific diaspora based in the UK. Six years and countless club nights later, Pulotu Underworld now has a partnership with the biggest DJ platform in the world, Boiler Room, where they’ve curated and run the ongoing Boiler Room Pacific Island events, including early 2024’s Rarotonga series featuring Andyhearttrob, Gat, DJ-K Swizz, Zeki, Styla, Giddy, and Jarome Pare & The Koka Boys, and November 2024’s all Māori Tāmaki Makaurau Boiler Room featuring Te KuraHuia, MOKOTRON, Katayanagi Twins, Poppa Jax, Caru, ATARANGI, MOKOMOKAI, and Seymore.

Shaka’s relationship with Boiler Room first began when she got the call-up from Tāmaki Makaurau’s trailblazing QTBIPOC club night FILTH co-founder Half Queen, who asked her to play at Aotearoa’s first ever Boiler Room event in collaboration with FILTH in 2021. What would soon become the most pivotal moment to impact her career, Lady Shaka’s groundbreaking set brought Pacific Island culture to the forefront of the world stage. Shaka opened her set with Oceania’s legendary 1999 track ‘Kotahitanga’, before launching into a spirited poi performance, while MC Manila chanted and purred on the mic and members of Aotearoa’s queer ballroom community vogued down around them.

“I think it was so pivotal because the world had never seen or heard anything like that before,” Shaka says. “A lot of people didn't even know where New Zealand was, or that we had music like that playing out in the trenches in Aotearoa. I think people were really shocked and amazed by how much culture we have here, and how queer, fabulous, and wonderful Aotearoa is. And how incredible that Aoteaora’s first ever Boiler Room was pacific, queer, and trans.”

Shaka’s first Boiler Room not only represented her decolonising the dancefloor, but also reclaiming the queer roots of the club as a proud trans woman surrounded by fellow femme queens, with the ballroom community of Tāmaki Makaurau standing (and dipping) in solidarity with her throughout the entire set. Originally, Shaka was set to DJ ballroom collective House Of Iman’s Iman Ball on the same night, which she ended up having to turn down in place of the FILTH Boiler Room - but the entire ballroom community still showed up for Shaka right after the ball finished.

“All of the femme queen mothers have a group chat, and one of the dolls had posted - we all need to show up for Shaka’s set after the ball. She’s a doll, and we need to support our girl.”

Following this, Shaka’s star was rapidly rising, and she’s since gone on to play at three more Boiler Room events, including her viral 2022 Melbourne set which today sits at over 600k views. But her bigger picture vision didn’t only include herself alone as the face of Pacific Islanders on the global platform. Her next mission was to create space and provide opportunities for the rest of the Pacific Island and Māori DJ, producer, and artists community to be seen and heard on the global platform.

“Later that year after I did that first Boiler Room, the platforms creative director, Amar, told me he’d love to catch up for lunch about how they can get me more involved. So I went to have lunch with him, and I literally just put him on the spot, like, hey, I’ve got this idea…

“‘I think we should do Boiler Room in the Pacific Islands’. I was like, here’s my pitch, and I pulled out this whole slideshow,” Shaka laughs. “And he loved it. So the whole idea has been in the works since 2021, and then I came up with the proper concept and put that to him in 2022. 2023 was the year of implementation and trying to get funding. And then the first Boiler Room Pacific Islands series happened in January 2024. We were so lucky we got to bring my sis Andyheartthrob over for it,” Shaka smiles as she mentions Andyheartthrob, the moniker of beloved DJ, promoter, Dynasty collective and DJ’s Anonymous founder Andrea Orani, a pillar of Tāmaki Makaurau’s DJ community who passed in December 2024 after a battle with cancer.

“It’s so special that that moment with her is immortalised forever. When we took her to get cremated, we played it the entire way there,” she pauses as the sun comes out from behind the clouds where we’re sitting upstairs in Ponsonby food court, where Andy’s family home is just a few blocks down the street. “I love that you said Andy’s name, and immediately the sun came back out.”

Pulotu Underworld’s second Boiler Room Pacific Islands event was last year's Tāmaki Makaurau all Māori lineup - an event equally as political as it was a party - falling on the same week as the national hīkoi for Toi Tu Te Tiriti. “I don’t think it could’ve happened at a better time, honestly,” Shaka says. “We kept having to move the fucking date of the event, and I was like, look, we need to set the date, so we’re sticking to that date. And then it just so happened that it was the same week of the hīkoi. And I’d been down to the hīkoi in Wellington, which was so beautiful, mean as wairua, I’m so glad I went. And then I came back for the Boiler Room, and it was - like MOKOTRON said - almost as if the event was the hīkoi after party. It felt like the final celebration of being Māori, after doing all of that mahi. It really was electric.”

After dabbling with making her own edits and remixes, last year, Shaka released her debut original music, with single ‘E Tu’ released via NLV Records. Weaving together a vocal sample of Aaria’s ‘Kei A Wai Rā Te Kupu’ with percussive club rhythms, ‘E Tu’ is a spirited chant of protest. Infused with as much deep intention as exhilarating energy, the sample’s opening lyrics, "me nekeneke tāua, e tū" mean “let's move together and stand up” in Te Reo Māori. Pushing forward the Pasifika club fusion movement, ‘E Tu’ was born when renowned New Zealand writer, DJ, and broadcaster Martyn Pepperell messaged Shaka after finding an old CD with the acapella of Aaria’s ‘Kei A Wai Rā Te Kupu’ on it.

“That same day, I made the whole track.” Shaka says. “And then I sat on it for a year, and it went through many different versions, and changed a lot since the original. So that’s all thanks to Martyn! He’s a big part of the ‘E Tu’ story.”

Shaka is gearing up to release more new original music this year, having just released an official remix for British girl group Flo’s ‘Check’. She’s hoping to have her debut EP out later this year, and has another remix coming out soon for renowned Māori musician Stan Walker, marking the R&B singer’s first ever club track. Another goal of Shaka’s this year is to get back to her dance roots. In January, she posted a video to Instagram with the caption, “I’ve made the decision to get back into dancing this year. Year of the snake let’s get it!”. Forever her first love, Shaka never really stopped dancing, though, and throughout her evolving career, movement has continued to be her main driving source of inspiration.

“I got back in the studio recently and just started choreographing again for the first time in a while. I performed on stage with the dancers at Splore festival last year, but we had a full routine this time, instead of just a little piece in the middle. And it was so great to curate, and in a way that relates to the club. Even at my WHAEA shows, Keanu and I are gonna put together a duo dance, and I can’t wait to do a little partner dance while we B2B together. I want to make it a full experience.

I really want to bring that element more to my DJ sets. Because I think my proudest performance so far was headlining Splore festival last year. I got off the stage and I just cried, and I was just so proud of what we managed to put on that stage. Because it wasn't just me DJing - it was a full production. And it was spiritual - I felt that spirit on stage and in the crowd. It felt like almost every aspect of my life was a part of that show. We had the ballroom community voguing, we had the aunty Rubi Du rapping, we had Pacific dance, we had hip hop dance... And it was dancers that I danced with as a kid who were dancing on stage with me, and we hadn’t danced together for 10 years,” Shaka reflects proudly on the full circle moment, witnessing all of her creative practices work together as one. “It was all of those different facets of my identity pulled into this one-hour performance, and that meant the world to me.”

-

Laura McInnes is a freelance writer & DJ regularly contributing to Mixmag ANZ from Tāmaki Makaurau. Find her on Instagram.