The t-shirts said: Full Circle Tour Then a logo: . Symmetry . Cape Town 16 November 1996 . Cape Town 19 November 2005 with the two dates across from each other on an ellipse, marked with diametrically opposed rings to indicate a plane of symmetry. You can sort-of see it, up there in the upper left corner. A good friend of mine designed it. We redesigned it, to a point. It spoke the truth, of course. It was indeed full circle for the band Symmetry, playing together again on 19 November 2005, the first time since 16 November 1996, nine years and three days earlier. The weird part, though, is that that night back in 1996 was the band's first ever gig, strictly invitation only stuff. I don't remember exactly what we played that balmy night nine years ago. I'm sure there was a Nirvana or two; definitely at least one Pearl Jam; chances are good that there was a Live or a Pixies or a U2 and perhaps an REM as well. We just aren't sure. I also have some money riding on a Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the others disagree. The second gig was a little different. We were nine years and three days older, and wiser. Theoretically also 9 years and 3 days more talented and well-versed, but that bit is decidedly not true. It was also invitation only; this time, though, far fewer invitations went out. Yeah, you kinda had to be really well-connected in either case. Okay, that's not true. Circles of friends just tend to tighten as time goes by, and the host of the party we played at was prepared only to crack the nod at a select few this time around. Disappointing, really, for the amount of work that was put in, but nevertheless. It so happens that the host is the bass player for the band, and back then seemed to be the only one willing to take a chance on us actually performing anything in public with actual people actually watching on purpose. I had some theatre training in my youth, and I'd always believed in a strict closed-door policy until we were Ready, and he decided that we were as ready as we would ever be. To a point, that was our undoing. To a more realistic point, only two of the five of us were ever really in it at all. But even then, we didn't really ever give ourselves any good backing, any belief at all that we could actually Pull This Off. The two of us still played often after the first gig, but then he left town after a two month stint in another actual band. I still play fairly often. A good few times a week, either on my battered old Classical guitar, or unplugged on my red electric, or when I'm feeling brazen, plugged in on my red electric, wailing away if there's nobody home to get annoyed. To my dismay, the ol' keyboard passed on some years back; irreparable and I didn't get around to replacing it, for various reasons. Still, some few months back, Craig said "let's play at my 30th. Like we did at my 21st. Let's get Symmetry together again." We laughed at the idea while privately entertaining it. Yeah, we hadn't played together in almost a decade, but Stephen and I still played often, even though he is 8 hours away and now ensconced in Flamenco guitar and a bad bad break-up, and we have enough time to get it together and rehearse a bit and we can send Stephen everything and we can put it together two days before showtime. Darren still has his drums and is up for it and everything. We all stay in touch, after all - we're best friends. There was just Gareth on vocals, who we haven't seen since... well, since 16 November 1996, with a vow to "call next time we practice." Gareth was a bit of an anomaly. We were jamming in Craig's garage - garage band, right? - when Gareth happened to walk past. Craig's mom's house is not exactly on a beaten track, so the chances of Gareth moseying past at the one time we were there doing our thing on a Saturday afternoon in September 1995 were remote, but it happened. He asked could he watch for a bit, then noticed that Stephen was kinda half-heartedly doing vocals as well as the guitar. He offered to sing a bit, and as-yet unnamed Symmetry had its newest member. We were all college boys - Stephen and I at the mighty University of Cape Town, where I am now completing my PhD, Craig and Darren at Cape Technikon, now the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and Gareth elsewhere, I forget where, and The Band was very much a spare time thing, with Stephen and I putting in more time than the others, as had been the case since we first started playing back in our final year of high school back in 1993. Darren only came along later - him and Craig met at college. To our discredit, we never really got in there with Gareth - he was from the neighbourhood but hadn't gone to school with us, so we didn't know him, and we didn't get to know him well, either. Our bad. But fast forward 14 months or so to the big bash where we did our thing to great applause - man, that was about as magic as you could get. Stephen and I had always thought we could actually make the big time if we committed; that we could progress bit by bit through the cover-band stage to the original band stage to, well, who knows how far? I'll admit at this point that my Reach for a Dream wish, were I on my deathbed, would be to play something, anything, on my guitar in a spotlight center-stage at a big event at the old, now being rebuilt, Wembley Stadium, home of English football and concert venue extraordinaire, in front of eighty thousand people. Yeah, go big or go home, I say. Can you see it, though? The crowd sweaty, muttering and thronging in anticipation, a slight hum through the hundred kilowatt system, the lights come up a bit, one spotlight on the guitar... the first note wails. It is distorted but crisp, compressed through the tubes glowing in the amp, the tone warm and driven, a hint of reverb sustained through the wall of speakers as it begins to feed back into the gain circuit... It would be beautiful. 16 November 1996 was a different affair. The atmosphere was electric. It was the start of summer, we'd been practiciing for months, and you could taste the adrenaline sparking against your teeth if you opened your mouth. It was out back near the pool, everyone parked on garden chairs or sitting on the wall as we pulled our shit out and plugged everything in and played out hearts out. We were probably crap, but we were only 20 and it was the end of the rainbow, near as we could tell and this was the High Life and we were Going Places and perhaps finally that night we even thought about committing seriously to doing this. But we didn't. We couldn't, really. We had nothing concrete. We had borrowed amps for the night, Stephen had no intention of dropping out of Medical SChool, Craig was seriously considering trying the 2-year working holiday thing in the UK and I was finally on my way into post-grad work at my current abode, and for all of us to actually stop doing that and try to be in a band for real was stupid. That and Craig to this day can barely play his guitar - he didn't ever own a bass - and Darren can't really keep time, kinda crucial for a drummer. Stephen and I didn't own the necessary amplification to actually be able to be heard, and we weren't nearly as good in the flesh as we were in our minds. I think deep-down our parents one and all were kinda relieved that we didn't come home that night with stars in our eyes. But boy do I wish we had. Nine years have passed, and we look back on that night with fond memories through rose-tinted glasses. This time around was a lot different. There was so much less of a sense of urgency from Craig and Darren - perhaps they wore their rose-tinted glasses for too long - and as I said earlier, Stephen was going through - actually, officially has just gone through 10 days ago - a break-up of an eight-year relastionship. That's another story for another time, perhaps. I was the only one who was remotely interested in getting this thing off the ground properly. I'm bitching now, I know. Again, perhaps I have too good a work ethic when it comes to this sort of thing. "Relax. We're not going to be as good as U2 or anything on the night" was Craig's observation, to which I shot back a defiant "Why not?" It got to the stage last week where I nearly pulled the plug on the whole thing, after another rehearsal was cancelled. I've heard all the excuses, from the good ("I'm going away") to the bad ("Tired") to the obscure ("I'm going on the Weakest Link and only getting back late") to the ridiculous ("I need to get my PS2 rechipped to play pirated games, and I don't want to have to drive back to fetch it later") to the just plain pathetic "I have a hangover and the drums will be too loud for my headache," to which my only response was "take a fucking Aspirin," because in all those cases, I had endured major rearrangements of my plans and my work shifts and karate and my PhD research work and family commitments and everything and that hangover Sunday I had got up really early - 5am - to come up to do my experiment and get finished in time for the rehearsal to have it called off fifteen minutes before it was due to start for Craig's hangover. And it was his party, and he was the one who still didn't know the material and needed the rehearsals, not me. When I phoned Stephen later that day to see how he was getting on, he confessed that, at t-minus 6 days to go, he still hadn't actually bothered to even start looking at the stuff I had couriered through to him NINE WEEKS earlier, or look at any of the emails or anything else I'd sent with further material in the interrim. It was at that point that I kinda let rip. He unfortunately got the brunt of it, but it's his own fault. Yes, I have never had an eight-year relationship go sour on me, so no, I don't know what it's like. But I do know that if I couldn't have handled it, I would have said so. I would have told my band, "look, I am not going to manage. Do it without me." If I had said, as he did, "I'll be there," then I would get on my bike, break-up or not, and put in the hours to put the material to bed. He didn't even listen to half the stuff so he hadn't actually even heard of some of the songs were playing on the night, which is unacceptable as far as I'm concerned. I had sat with Craig for 5 weekends in a row, teaching him the material, then we had got Darren in and I had to sit with him and teach him the material too, and I am not a drummer. Both of them kept threatening to actually sit down and work through it all. Go on - I dare you. And Andrew, our new vocalist in lieu of Gareth, and my oldest friend who I went on The Tour with and who was lucky to get home alive, also didn't know half the stuff, and kept arguing about the stuff he did know. I was so close to walking out... if I didn't still have the stars in my eyes, I would have. Stephen breezed into town Thursday night after a traumatic nine hour drive. We arranged to have a quiet, drumless practice later - 9pm - at Andrew's place, and Andrew arrived late, all pissed off for some reason, so he got the riot act read to him as well. Friday I left the University early to get the shirts sorted out (part of the reason Andrew was pissed off was that we'd tweaked his design, because during the design process, we all agreed on certain things and he ignored them) and to have another session with Stephen. Saturday was showtime, and we did 3 hours of rehearsing that morning with everyone. It was a collective bated-breath, because that's when the orchestra I could hear in my head would finally be proven right or wrong. I'm kinda good at that big-picture stuff; but in more a case of also seeing all the small pictures in great detail as they make up the big picture, so when the others had said "this isn't going to work" during rehearsals, or "it sounds off/funny/shit" and I had persisted and insisted on carrying on, this was the time to see if I was right. Also, it was the first time we had everything up loud, so it was the first time we'd see if Andrew could actually pull off singing in front of a band. Although keen to try it, he'd never done it before, and had mumbled his way through the few rehearsals. Eat your heart out, American and Pop Idols, that kind of thing. Showtime came and went. It was far less exciting than that balmy night back in '96, because we'd realised that afternoon that it was actually all going to work and work well, which took the edge off, and also because this time the guest list was so small. Yeah, we sounded phenomenal. We got it all on a DVD-camcorder thingy, apparently, if it worked properly, and it seemed that everyone was well impressed with us. At one stage, even the neighbours cheered from over the wall. Lots of cameras went off. 10 weeks after inception, countless hours of arranging and rearranging and teaching and reteaching and coaching and tweaking and phoning and e-mailing on my part and I'm going to claim the victory. And I am going to say the others rode in on my coat-tails, while they congratulate themselves on all their hard work. For the sake of posterity, the final set-list: 1. Times Like These - Foo fighters, a blend of their acoustic and original versions, as nicked from the Anywhere But Home DVD 2. Where is my mind? - Pixies 3. Today - Smashing Pumpkins 4. Under the Bridge - RHCP 5. DAkota - the Stereophonics 6. Knockin' on Heaven's Door - a bastardised version halfway between the numerous covers and the Guns 'n' Roses version, but woth only half the lyrics, hastily put together that morning 7. Under Pressure - the Used/My Chemical Romance version for Tsunami Relief, with Ice Ice Baby thrown in at the end for shits and giggles Historical Note: Tracks 1 and 6 were initially supposed to be Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Green Day, and Paradise City by G'n'R; however consensus during rehearsal was that these were not going to work so well, because I couldn't see it in my head. In retrospect, they probably would have. Now there's talk of Symmetry heading east to Port Elizabeth for Stephen's 30th in March... I'll believe it when I see it. -d-