Sounds From The Junkshop #28 - Symposium

 

"If this is all there is to life, there's gotta be another one with different people, songs, a different sky and a different sun" - Symposium, One Day At A Time, 1997

Ah the joys of being young, drunk and daft. I think Symposium first came to my attention at the start of 1997 when it seemed as though every magazine was tipping them to be that year's big thing (Melody Maker, Kerrang, NME and Select were all pretty enthusiastic about them at the beginning) plus they'd put a single out on the awesome Fierce Panda label (Last Song Forever). The press were variously describing them as either West London's answer to Green Day or the new Senseless Things which was enough to pique my interest given my Things fandom a few years earlier.

Unfortunately both of their first two major label singles, Drink The Sunshine and Farewell To Twilight, were...a bit disappointing to put it mildly. While the loud guitars were there, that sense of defiance and snottiness that informed the Things and Green Day at their best was depressingly absent. There was just something about them, especially lyrically, that felt a bit too...well, nice, to be honest - like they were reining it in when they should be screaming and shouting and kicking loose.

It wasn't until seeing the band live at the V97 festival in Leeds that I really got it to be honest but feck me, they converted me that day. This was a band who were very much in their element in the live arena - frontman Ross was an absolute whirling dervish, climbing the rig, throwing himself into the crowd and whipping the moshpit up into a frenzy. Behind him the band had an almost frightening energy, chucking themselves around the stage like human stock cars. When they finally nailed it on record with their fourth single Fairweather Friend which unlike its predecessors really did capture their fearsome live energy onstage (complete with a chaotic Top of the Pops performance) it felt like they'd finally kicked things into gear and were ready to conquer the world.

Unfortunately, capturing their live energy on record seemed to be Symposium's Achilles heel. When their debut mini-album One Day At A Time surfaced in the autumn it contained a good four or five absolute bangers (the title track, Fairweather Friend and Puddles being the pick of the bunch) but also a good two or three songs which were pretty anonymous unfortunately. It was really frustrating because I went to see them a lot over the next two years and every time they were brilliant - I've got especially fond memories of a gig in Leeds (the Duchess I think?) where their rig broke about four songs in. With a disgruntled crowd waiting for the sound to come back on, bassist Wojtek (aka Womble) didn't exactly help things by leading the audience in a chant of "The engineer's a wanker!" and "Let's all trash the venue, let's all trash the venue, na-naaaa-naa-na!" leading to a number of decidedly panicky looking road crew running around behind him trying to get things working again!

The group would soldier on into 1998, releasing a series of solid singles - The Answer To Why I Hate You and Average Man were both decent. Unfortunately, when their first full album, On The Outside, surfaced in 1998 it suffered from the same inconsistency issues as its predecessor. When the group nailed it such as on Impossible, Natural, Blue, The End and the surprisingly melodic title track they sounded great but elsewhere the likes of Bury You, Nothing Special and Circles, Squares and Lines sounded either messy or just plain dull. The group's chart positions were starting to worsen by this point and none of their singles after 1997 managed to breach the Top 40.

Symposium would leave their major label deal with Infectious towards the end of '98 by what football fans would term "mutual consent". The band stated that it was a conscious decision due to the fact that the label was owned by Rupert Murdoch (and all credit to them if so) but I suspect that underachievement of On The Outside and the singles from it might well have played a part as well. They would return in 1999 with one final single Killing Position on an indie label, comfortably their heaviest effort to date but it missed the charts by a mile and the band would split soon afterwards. I saw what must have been one of their final gigs at the Leeds Festival in 1999 and they gave a good account of themselves with a mix of old favourites and new songs suggesting a heavier direction was in the offing for the next album. Unfortunately it never came to pass.

Guitarist Will and drummer Joe would go on to form emo dullards Hell Is For Heroes (one decent song I Can Climb Mountains and an awful lot of tuneless yowling). I think Ross joined them initially but left before they released anything - Wikipedia has him eventually resurfacing in a band called Paper Cuts who I have to be honest and say completely passed me by. Bizarrely, I last saw Womble on the TV show This Morning playing keyboards for Bjorn Again!

It's a real shame Symposium never quite managed to capture their awesome live energy on record the way that say the Senseless Things did with The First Of Too Many and I think that's probably a big factor in why "West London's Green Day" never produced something to rival Dookie or Insomniac. Given that Will and Joe seem more interested in touring with a reunited Hell Is For Heroes (look, I'm sorry, I know a lot of people who did like 'em but they just never did it for me at all), I think any sort of Symposium reunion is sadly out of the question which is a real shame - I certainly know which one I'd prefer to see. Anyway, even if they're a bit inconsistent, there's still enough good songs on Symposium's recorded output to make it worth your listening to - it's just a shame that there isn't some sort of virtual gig experience I could relive those sweaty nights in the moshpit watching them as an 18-19 year old. Ah the joys of being young, drunk and daft...