Non Bossy Posse: Legends of an Alternative Sydney
Welcome to the first post for the new and improved FOTW Audio Productions website!!
Described by the music media of the day as ‘four punks with keyboard samplers,’ Non Bossy Posse were in fact a live techno group with a political edge, employing the DIY ethos of punk. This particular track ‘Eviction’ was made up of real samples of an eviction of squatters, the Direct Action Against Homelessness group, from the innercity suburb of Glebe. The samples came from recorded video footage, but also mainstream TV news reports of the event.
A friend and I originally played this on an afternoon radio show we did at Radio Skidrow, a community radio station in the heart of Marrickville, during our final year of high school. The songs had been recorded onto a cart, a special kind of looping tape format made for ads in radio. There were four tracks taken from the cassette release, Saboteurs of the Big Daddy Mindfuck.
It is very interesting to hear this song again after all these years, considering that this week saw the publication in the media of a statistic that 70,000 flats in Sydney appear to be empty, suggesting that it is no more efficient to leave the flats unoccupied, and wait for a capital gains, then rent them out and have them depreciate.
Below is a trailer for a documentary made a couple of years ago by one of the original Non Bossy Posse members, Peter Strong, about the Sydney DIY dance music scene of the nineties and noughties, that Non Bossy Posse were fundamentally connected with in a variety of forms.
As part of this first post, I would also like to give a special thanks to John Jacobs, whose help and subtle encouragement over the past twenty years has always helped to steer me in the right creative direction, despite whatever side routes I might have been taking at the time!
2020 UPDATE
Since writing this post back in 2016, Non Bossy Posse have taken to Bandcamp, re-issuing many of their original recordings, remastered and also remixed!
Below is a great collection of some of their best tracks remixed, including the amazing Babylon, a critique of 6000 years of selfish capitalism: