Danny Abood with Sylvia and the Synthetics at Paddington Town Hall. Photograph: William Yang
Danny Abood with Sylvia and the Synthetics at Paddington Town Hall. Photograph: William Yang
They hung themselves from meat hooks, pelted their audience with offal – and blazed a trail for radical queer performance in Australia
LoCarmen
Thu 25 Feb 2021 11.30 EST
Last modified on Thu 4 Mar 2021 19.38 EST
Sylvia and the Synthetics – Australia’s audacious drag provocateurs and underground LGBTQ pioneers – burned brightly and chaotically for the short two years of their reign.
In 1972, Morris Spinetti, the group’s “founding mother”, was performing as a mime artist with Australia’s first female rock star, Wendy Saddington, when the concept was dreamt up with Paul Hock and Denis Norton.