The Wonder of Brian Cox

by Ben Falk

  Cox on the other hand didn’t seem to care about the publicity, mainly because he didn’t appear to partake in any of it. Despite being called a group, almost every interview featured only Peter Cunnah talking about himself and what the band were going to do next; the singer became something of a music magazine pin-up. He featured in at-home pieces and there was a tabloid spread about his birth mother tracking him down. In early 1994, coverage of the band didn’t include Cox at all. ‘I just did the keyboards,’ he said later. ‘Pete was the one who got all the attention.’ Yet photos of the band in Melody Maker and NME in January and February 1994 don’t feature Cox at all, just Cunnah surrounded by a cache of session musicians.

  There was a reason D:Ream were so ubiquitous as they rolled into 1994. They had released their first album titled rather portentously D:Ream On Volume 1 the previous October and it had reached No. 5 in the charts. Cox is credited as playing piano on the song ‘Star’, which was released as part of a double A-side single at the beginning of that month. Then in January 1994, off the back of the successful Take That tour, Magnet decided to re-release ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. The anthem had been written as early as 1989 by Cunnah and his songwriting colleague, Jamie Petrie; it was a shrewd move and the song rocketed to the No. 1 spot. Despite the encroaching tide of grunge, and specifically Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, music journalists had a soft spot for Cox’s gang. ‘D:Ream are the best dance act this side of the moon and it’s a crime that they’re not as big as M People already with their fab dancey tunes,’ wrote Leesa Daniels in Smash Hits. In the Melody Maker, Ian Gittins was just as effusive. ‘With their compelling sunrise keyboard breaks and positivist mantras, [D:Ream] soon became a clubland inspiration, an underground totem,’ he said.

  ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ remained in the charts for an impressive 16 weeks. Fifteen years on, a Guardian reader picked Cox up on the song as being a breach of the second law of thermodynamics, referring to the inevitable decay occurring in the universe as a result of entropy and how the title directly opposes this theory. Cox had a sense of humour about it. ‘It is,’ he replied, ‘and I’ve already apologised for the scientific inaccuracy in this and other D:Ream songs.’ In March, the group followed their success with yet another re-release for ‘U R The Best Thing’, which this time reached No. 4. The single’s lyrics appeared in Smash Hits’ famous songbook section and now they charged £9 a ticket for audiences to see them on tour in venues such as The Anvil in Basingstoke and the Manchester Apollo, a hall familiar to Cox from his Dare days. Every month, they’d have all-night parties at Cunnah’s flat after a night out at trendy London nightspot Subterania. Pete Stanton reviewed the single in Smash Hits, giving it four stars and calling the keyboard sound ‘plinkety pianos’.

  Throughout all this, Cox was keeping up with university work, maintaining the good grades that would keep him on course to continue with his studies beyond BSc level into post-graduate status. With D:Ream about to head off on a world tour, just as he had three years before, he now faced a choice. ‘I’ve made very few big decisions,’ he explained to Kirsty Young on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. ‘I’ve sort of been carried along in life. But one of them was the second year of university when D:Ream got very big and I think we’d just toured with Take That. D:Ream went off on a big world tour to Australia, America – and so the question came up, “do you stay at university or do you go off and tour the world?”’ Cox chose to quit the band and remain at Manchester, a decision he never regretted. He was tired of schlepping around the world in someone else’s pocket and wanted to concentrate on using his brain. ‘It was brilliant,’ he said, ‘but I got out at the right time.’

  Just as with Dare, his departure came at the right time for the fortunes of the band. Cunnah had an escalating drugs problem and any notion of it being a collective was gone. Instead, D:Ream was only the frontman and what Smash Hits described as a ‘floating group of musicians’. In 1995, they released second album, World, which didn’t received such acclaim as the first and despite the single ‘Shoot Me With Your Love’ reaching No. 7, Cunnah broke up the band – ‘I became pretty obnoxious,’ he later explained in an interview.

  Cox had long since gone back to focusing on physics by then, but of course this wasn’t the end of his days as a D:Ream-er. In 1997, Labour looked to shatter 18 years of Conservative rule at the General Election in May. Change was the by-word on every shadow politician’s lips and some bright spark in the campaign office thought it might be an idea to adopt a song reflecting that ideal. And so it was that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ received yet another lease of life as the soundtrack for the wannabe new government. Cox was in Hamburg working on his PhD when he took a call from Peter Cunnah to ask if he fancied getting the band back together. He had just been awarded a first-class honours degree from Manchester and had chosen to stay on as a post-grad and further his qualifications. ‘Pete rang me up and said, “Do you want to pop back on stage? It’ll be a laugh,”’ Cox told Shortlist. ‘And it was.’

  The band went on rallies up and down the country, meeting future Prime Minister Tony Blair on a number of occasions. ‘It was all so surreal,’ revealed Cunnah to the Guardian. ‘I was on the Prescott Express, going round the country, performing with Tony Blair and listening to loads of fortysomethings sing my song. One day [John] Prescott told me he was fed up with the song because he’d sung it so many times. And I said, “John, don’t even go there!” – I was the really fed-up one.’ Still, Cox enjoyed getting back in the pop saddle. As before, his parents had been cautious when he resigned from the group, thinking it might prove a backward step. After all, the five years of previously being in Dare had formed his character, taking him from a teenager to a young adult. Up on stage with D:Ream again – and for what, at the time, felt like such a momentous cause – made him very happy. ‘Being part of the election in 1997 was an iconic moment,’ he said. ‘We were right at the centre of the action and our song was at the heart of it.’

  ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ was released as a single for the third time at the beginning of May 1997 and got as high as number 19. On the day of the election, the band recorded an appearance on Top of the Pops. ‘We went to a hotel Labour had got us, overlooking the Houses of Parliament,’ Cox remembered to the Observer. ‘[We] sat there, watched all those classic moments. Portillo getting voted out!’ With the results in, Cox and his band mates headed to the Royal Festival Hall in London for the Labour victory party. At the time of writing, it was the last time they appeared onstage. YouTube is full of videos featuring Blair and his cohorts singing along to the song. ‘There’s that famous scene when John Prescott, Robin Cook, Neil Kinnock and everyone were dancing,’ said Cox, ‘so that was my fault.’ With hindsight, some people have criticised the band for being part of New Labour, but Cox himself only remembers a scene of optimism and happiness. In fact, author John O’Farrell used the song’s title for his book about being a Labour supporter in opposition between 1979 and 1997.

  Many years later, Cox bumped into Blair in Oxford and the two had a brief catch-up. ‘I’ve got good memories and bad,’ Cunnah told writer Nicole Veash in 2001. ‘I’ll never forget Peter Mandelson fluffing the words. Or the big bear hug that Alastair Campbell gave me as Portillo lost his seat. But even now I can’t stand listening to the song. I’m sure Tony Blair feels the same way.’

  D:Ream broke up again soon afterwards and went their separate ways. Cunnah had escaped his drug addiction by the time Labour came calling, but despite Cunnah investing £60,000 of his own money into a third studio album, record bosses weren’t interested and it remained unreleased. A Best Of was unveiled instead. He moved into songwriting, penning music for an ITV kids’ show called Star Street. Mackenzie returned to his day job as a DJ on the club circuit. Cox went back to Germany, but has since talked about the usefulness of his time as a pop star after he became a television celebrity. ‘As I’ve got into this new career in the media, it’s a good grounding,’ he e
xplained in 2011. ‘The way that I handle increasing levels of attention has a lot to do with the fact I’d had to do it once, albeit in a smaller bubble. It’s helped.’

  He has also joked that the standard of groupie he gets nowadays is higher than when he was performing. ‘More educated,’ he laughed to the Sunday Times. ‘Let’s just say when they wake up in the morning, they’re more likely to read the Sunday Times than the News of the World.’ However, physics continued to be his primary focus. ‘Being a scientist is more than just a job you do,’ he said. ‘It really does shape the way that you look at the world and what excites you and what interests you. It gives you the tools, I suppose, to really appreciate nature and appreciate the universe for what it is. Which is magnificent. It’s a path to an excellent career, but it’s a path to immense entertainment, a real box of treasures.’

  Right now, that treasure box was waiting for him in Germany.

  CHAPTER 5

  ACADEMIA, LOVE AND TV

  Brian Cox had a first-class degree and like most scientists had decided to stay on at university and pursue his PhD. By the time New Labour came calling, he was fully ensconced in the next cycle of his academic journey. Manchester had a strong post-graduate programme and his desire to spend time in the lab as a researcher was acute. ‘We need first-class researchers,’ he said. ‘Because whilst the technology of today is based on the science of yesterday, the technology of tomorrow is going to be based on today’s science and you do not know what you’re going to find out about the universe.’

  Though he had started out concentrating more on astrophysics and even cosmology, he now narrowed his focus as he progressed towards what he would ultimately become known for: particle physics. This was useful, because Manchester University had strong ties with the world’s leading particle physics labs, home to the best particle accelerators – Tevatron in Chicago, Hamburg’s HERA and CERN, where the idea of the Large Hadron Collider (the world’s largest particle accelerator) was at that time in the midst of germinating. He had a season ticket to Oldham Athletic, where he watched his favourite players of the era, among them Andy Ritchie. And it was at this time that he met the man who would end up as a close friend and collaborator. Professor Jeff Forshaw – as he is now – was a very young lecturer at Manchester University when the pair first came into contact during Cox’s post-graduate days. A theoretical physicist by trade, Forshaw immediately saw something in the student sitting in his class. ‘He’s about the same age as me, so he was a little bit different in the class,’ remembers Forshaw. ‘I taught a class of about 20 people and Brian was one of the students and we got talking. He being a little bit older and a little more confident to come and talk to me afterwards, we immediately hit it off. We’re very good friends and we just clicked quite early on, going out drinking together, going out on runs together, from quite an early stage. Because he was doing a PhD and because we were the same age and because I was quite a young academic at the time, it wasn’t like teacher/student – there wasn’t that kind of formality associated with it.’

  In fact, Forshaw felt Cox was a breath of fresh air, someone who had come to the scientific profession having had a full and interesting life away from it, unlike many career academics. Above all, their attitudes to science were in sync. ‘What we do have in common is we do see physics in a similar way and I think that’s very important in a collaboration,’ he says, referring to later joint professional efforts. ‘If you’re not on the same wavelength as somebody else, it can be quite difficult to talk about the ideas and make progress talking about them. Brian and I do tend to think in a very similar way. And we ask questions of each other that help us to make progress in developing the understanding so in that sense we bonded on this. The friendship developed first. And always we’ve spent a lot of time outside of a formal physics session, just talking about physics and talking about how we see physics; how we understand concepts in physics.’

  With a close friendship now formed, work on the PhD began in earnest. ‘I started studying supernovas, when stars at the end of their life explode and a colossal amount of energy comes out,’ he told young interviewers from Stockley School who managed to bag a chat with him at the Big Bang Fair, ‘so I worked on how to detect them on earth and then I went into particle physics. I started working on the structure of the proton.’ It became clear that he needed to go and work at a particle accelerator, where huge detectors studied atoms up close in a prelude to the Large Hadron Collider. The Deutches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) is the largest German research centre for particle physics – a lab located in Bahrenfeld, a suburb west of Hamburg.

  Founded in December 1959 and funded by public money, this was home to the Hadron-Electron Ring Accelerator (HERA), the first electron-proton collider in the world. Constructed between 1984 and 1990 (and going online in 1992), it was one of the first internationally financed projects of this scale, though it has since shut down in 2007. Like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, it was housed in a large tunnel (in HERA’s case, 6.3km long, between 10 and 25m underground), running outside the DESY site. The H1 detector was hidden by a dark red concrete wall, which itself hid a three-storey high electronics trailer. At around 2,800 tonnes, it was monitored and run by a team of approximately 300 physicists from 15 different countries. Ostensibly a general purpose detector built to deal with the collision of leptons and protons, H1 had some specific tools, namely to study particle jets in specially-constructed chambers, silicon trackers and muon detectors. This meant it was equipped to handle jet and particle production, as well as diffraction – an area of physics that Cox was particularly interested in.

  Cox began visiting the facility about three years after work began in 1995, something he continued for a number of years. ‘He was not so much living in Hamburg as visiting spasmodically,’ says Professor John Dainton, now the Sir James Chadwick Chair of Physics at the University Of Liverpool, but then the physics co-ordinator at HERA. ‘He joined as a PhD student. PhD students would come out and spend time at the laboratory, as well as work in their home university departments. When he first came, I was just becoming what we call the physics co-ordinator of this big group of physicists, which means I was responsible for all the physics output – making sure the 300 physicists could get their papers out, properly refereed and that we were doing the physics we should do. While he was on the experiment, I was also what’s called a spokesperson, which is head of the experiment.’

  From Dainton and his team’s point of view, HERA’s goal was extremely simple. ‘Particle physics has been concerned with trying to understand the very shortest distances and times, and how it relates to physical law,’ he explains. ‘We’ve been pushing to get higher and higher energy in collisions of what are known to be the pieces of matter that we understand are basic presently. This meant we started off with colliders back in the Seventies that were 3 or 4 GeV [giga-electron volt, a unit for measuring how much energy passes through an electron] and we went right through up to 300 GeV [on HERA]. The LHC is going up to 14,000 GeV. [HERA] was the only collider that collided head-on a particle that we think we still understand, called the electron, which is one of the two particles in the hydrogen atom and the simplest atomic nucleus which is called a proton. Two rings ramped the beams up to these high energies and we built a big experiment called H1 around one of the interaction regions.

  ‘And there was another experiment in another interaction regions. It was a smaller version of the LHC, but it was designed to use the electrons to drill holes in the proton and understand what the proton is made of – break it up in ways we could measure. And in that way we could understand what a proton is made of, and what are the laws of force that hold it together, and how these pieces called “the quarks” interact with the electron. We had a pretty good idea how an electron would interact with a quark, we hoped that idea would be wrong and what we essentially found was we could measure extremely accurately how an electron and a quark interacted and it fitted a preconceived picture cal
led a standard model.’

  Cox’s direct supervisor was Robin Marshall, a scientist who has since retired. He held the equivalent chair to Professor Dainton in Manchester and spent his time at the university running the group that Cox was a part of. ‘[Cox] was engaged in the experiment and he did his stuff,’ says Dainton, who saw Brian most days in the corridor for a chat, but would remain apart from him and his drinking buddies socially. ‘It’s a collaborative effort, so there are certain things you have to take responsibility for if you want to be a part of it – it’s a huge enterprise.’ Working on a project such as the H1 meant that Cox had to lend his signature to the academic papers and reports produced, alongside all those working on it. That meant keeping to a schedule, something he wasn’t always good at.

  ‘I can remember exactly [what he was doing] because he took too long to write the paper on it,’ Dainton recalls. ‘I spent half my time saying “where’s your paper, where’s your paper?” He took a long time because he was doing all this other stuff.’ Nevertheless, the physics he was doing at HERA fed nicely into his PhD thesis, which was eventually published and titled ‘Rapidity Gaps Between Jets in Photo Production at HERA’. It was about a special kind of collision between photons (light particles) and protons (sub-atomic particles which help make up an atom’s nucleus). ‘One of the things we discovered at HERA was that the proton has a structure that we expected, but it also exhibits other aspects,’ explains Dainton. ‘Namely aspects which tell you why or how two protons interact with each other. We discovered a particular sort of interaction that we could measure in a certain way. It was completely unexpected. Brian worked on essentially trying to understand how this phenomena was related to the way the quarks came out of the interaction. The quarks come out and they make jets – they literally look like jets in the detector.