Soane Profile

aka Soane Filitonga

Simon Grigg

29 May 2013

Born in the village of Vava'u in Tonga, Soane Filitonga was a pioneering DJ and dance producer based in Auckland who had substantial success both in New Zealand and in the UK dance scenes between 1998 and the mid-2000s.

A doorman at Roma and Box/Cause Celebre nightclubs in Auckland in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was also spinning records as DJ Big Daddy by 1993 with a regular Sunday residency at Cause Celebre in 1994, having begun playing various parties around Auckland in 1989.

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In 1994 he DJed with the Proud era Otara Millionaires Club, touring New Zealand on the Proud tour – Pauly Fuemana and Alan Jansson would partially write OMC's 'Never Coming Back' about Soane's time in Tonga in the early 1990s when he failed to renew his residency in New Zealand and was briefly refused re-entry. Soane was "brother Pele" in OMC's 'How Bizarre' lyric.

Soane moved to Sydney in 1995, where he began DJing full time, developing a unique deep-house sound. He had also begun to create his own music. Confidently, he returned to Auckland in 1997 where he reinvented himself as a fulltime house DJ with a residency at Calibre in Karangahape Road’s St. Kevin’s Arcade.

Calibre was the club of the moment and Soane was quickly the club’s superstar DJ. He was taken under the wing of the visiting DJ/producers from Manchester’s very hip Paper Recordings and Blackpool’s Shaboom Records and encouraged to write and produce.

Soane would release three singles for the label over the next two years – ‘Go Master’, ‘Herringbone’ and ‘Saxy Beast’ (the last with Dick Johnson). Each entered the UK club charts.

In 2000 his track ‘Big Al G’ became a massive underground hit in Auckland, but with a heavily dominant, uncleared sample (from Al Green), the track was not released beyond the CD-Rs that were circulating in some numbers.

Soane also released three singles as a member of Troffman, with Englishmen Ben Davis and Dick Johnson, for the UK label Shaboom including ‘Le Saucier’, a big British club hit in 2000, with a Greg Churchill and Peter Van der Fluit remix on the B-side.

Soane toured the UK and France in 1999 and again in 2000, still finding time to remix DLT, Che Fu and King Kapisi for single release in New Zealand.

A DJ mix album In Music released by the label of the same name in 2002 was followed two years later by Soane’s first full album New Zealand release Tongan Chic, released by In Music in 2004, and partially funded by Red Bull.

Co-produced by Luke Tomes and Dick Johnson, the album was critically well received and included the single ‘Where Do We Go?’ with vocals from Anthony Gold (Anthony Ioasa), a substantial Auckland club and radio hit that year. The album also included vocal contributions from Sisters Underground's Hassanah Iroegbu, Boh Runga and Tha Feelstyle.

Soane passed away on 9th November 2014, aged 43. His funeral attracted over 1000 mourners.

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Soane with fellow DJ and Cause Celebre/Box doorman Time Sulusi, 1990

Photo credit: Photo by Brigid Grigg-Eyley

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Soane's Go Master 12-inch single from 2001. Released on the UK label Paper Recordings, it was representative of the explosion in New Zealand electronic music in at the turn of the decade, often released by offshore labels like Paper and Shaboom, or New Zealand's Reliable Recordings. Go Master made the UK club chart Top 10.

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DJ Soane at Calibre. Soane's journey from club doorman to headlining DJ to record producer to the UK club charts made him one of the stars of the thriving Auckland club scene of the 90s and early 2000s.

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