Start / The James McMahon Music Podcast / Episode 73 symposium

Episode 73: Symposium

40 min • 2 november 2022

Firstly, have you joined the Substack yet?

If you’re of an age, and you came to that age sometime during the mid-to-late 90s, and you’re a fan of punky indie rock, and you read the music press – NME, Melody Maker and Kerrang! – each and every Wednesday, maybe you listened to the Evening Session on BBC Radio One, perhaps you were a barfly at your local toilet venue, maybe nothing mattered more to you than Reading Festival and the pre-bourgeois Glastonbury… well, chances are your entry point to music was London five-piece Symposium, who burned brightly for a few years and then imploded, skewering into groups like Hell is for Heroes and Paper Cuts.

Well, quite amazingly, Symposium are back, with a Greatest Hits – Do You Remember How It Was? 1996 – 1999, available on streaming platforms now – and a one-off live show at London’s Islington Assembly Hall on November 17th, 2022. And I do remember how it was. And it was largely great. But messy. And chaotic. In way both brilliant and bruital. And so what better time than now to connect with singer Ross Cummins and bassist Wojtek Godzisz to ask what went wrong all those years ago... and what has appeared to go right now.

And where I can find an Animals That Swim t-shirt in an extra large.