The Wonder of Brian Cox

by Ben Falk

  What Cox didn’t seem to talk about once he reached a certain age was work. Rather, it was something that he carried on doing quietly, away from his friends. Nor did he initially share his desire to pursue music on a more long-term basis with them, at least not in any serious way. In fact, Haughton doesn’t recall him being particularly musical at all, or at least not ostentatious about it. ‘You blend into the group you’re in,’ he says of being a teenager. ‘Anything that separates you, you try and avoid that as much as you possibly can – it’s all about trying to fit in. If all your mates are talking about these girls, it might be the thing that interests you, but all you talk about is girls because that’s the conversation.’ And fit in he did. ‘I would say 90 per cent of our conversation was women. Probably another 4 or 5 per cent was “isn’t school terrible?” and which off licence would sell us a bottle of Yates’s Original Wine, which tasted absolutely awful, but got you absolutely plastered. There was very little conversation about anything which involved academia.’

  Away from the school gang, though, Cox was thinking about his future. Even then, he was considering media as a career choice if music didn’t work out. In one particular case, he tried to combine the two. Cox has talked about doing work experience on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester as a teenager; how he was 15 and there to answer phones, while sharing an office with broadcaster Chris Evans, then another lowly intern. But the DJ he worked for – children’s TV favourite, Timmy Mallett – remembers it slightly differently. Mallett recalls a young man walking into his Timmy On The Tranny show with loftier ambitions. ‘At age 17, he’d shown up in a rock star T-shirt, a mop of wild hair and a big smile, clutching keyboards,’ he described in one of his Brilliant TV podcasts. ‘He was the glamorous boyfriend of one of our phone call takers. “Brian’s got some jingles for you” she said, and as usual, I grilled him, had a listen, told him to work on them and come back when they were great. He grinned, agreed and did.’ According to Mallett, they became Cox’s first musical success. ‘We used them on Piccadilly’s award-winning night-time pop show,’ said the presenter. ‘Now Brian’s a star scientist, expounding the wonders of the universe on television, living his dream. If we ever find those jingles – and they will be somewhere – on an old cassette tape in someone’s loft, we’ll have a laugh and recall the enthusiasm and adventure that went into having a chance and seizing it.’ Chances are, Cox hopes they will never be found.

  Despite all this, he still intended to go to university and sat four A-levels: maths, chemistry, physics and general studies. He did well in the latter three, but found mathematics especially hard. ‘I found out quite late in life that I could do maths,’ he said later. ‘I didn’t like maths at all in school, but I did it because I liked physics and I thought I had to do it.’ It wasn’t until later that he realised if he treated maths like a craft, a musical instrument, something he had to practice and spend hours doing, that he could do it. He dedicated himself to understanding equations and doing the workings and gradually became better and better. However, at A-level, he got a D grade. It must have been especially difficult receiving his grade, since maths does seem to be so central to anyone who wants to pursue physics or science as a career. By that point, however, music had already begun to take over his life and the idea of becoming a pop star was firmly in his head. ‘I was at a gig in Manchester the night before [my maths A-level] and went straight from there,’ he said. ‘But I got an A in physics, so I just being lazy, really. I was thinking, it doesn’t matter what I get in my A-levels because I’m going to be a musician.’

  He would worry about quadratic equations later. School friend Tim Haughton certainly doesn’t remember Cox obsessing over his grades or schoolwork. ‘A lot of people look at someone like Brian and think geek,’ he says, ‘must have been, somebody who has got that level of knowledge and is into these things. But he just wasn’t. Although that was my initial impression of him, that he was geeky and studious, he certainly wasn’t as I remember him 14, 15 years old onwards. He was quite the partygoer, just a really down-to-earth regular lad. I remember him being a really good laugh, very much one of the lads. Awesome winklepickers!’

  It’s worth pointing out not everyone at school had great respect for Cox. Definitely not the anonymous Facebooker, who created a page called ‘I urinated in Brian Cox’s school bag’. While it may be tempting to pass this off as a shameless social networking gag, there’s a mention of a teacher’s name – on the page Ben Counsel, but most likely meant to be Bernard Counsel, who was certainly a teacher at Oldham Hulme. A relative of Counsel’s even phoned up while Cox was on Radio 2 in 2011 to point out the fact that Counsel was one of his masters. You can decide how realistic this ‘anecdote’ may be.

  Yet the question with famous people and their school days is always the same: could you tell he was going to be a celebrity when he was just a teenager? Not so, according to Tim Haughton. ‘Funnily enough, I met up with some guys from school a month or so ago and that was a topic of conversation,’ he says. ‘The honest answer is not really, no. Clearly Brian’s an intelligent lad but then there were other people in the group who were always the joker, very confident. Not as intelligent as Brian, but the kind of guys who you could imagine popping up on TV one morning.’ He remembers hearing Cox’s name again, years later, when he was a part of dance outfit D:Ream. ‘D:Ream, with the nicest will in the world, were a one-hit wonder,’ says Haughton. ‘They had so much success with that one song. And you thought, this has got to be the springboard to much greater things and they just disappeared off the face of the planet. You expect that people get one bite of the cherry with that sort of thing. And yet years later, here he is again. Everyone was dead chuffed for him. He’s a nice guy. Who doesn’t begrudge somebody decent doing well for themselves? We had a bit of a giggle about it, really.’

  Another person close to the school who wishes to remain anonymous echoes these sentiments. ‘He was obviously a bright chap and a bit unconventional, [but] I wouldn’t have known he was going to turn out like that,’ he says. ‘To be fair, he’s got the right manner and he’s just got the breaks.’

  Having Brian Cox, the famous TV physicist, as a former pupil has only meant good things for the school itself. It continues to thrive (and the door between the girls and boys has since been removed!) and a number of the pupils study science beyond A-levels. ‘He’s been very good, not just for the school but for science,’ says one source. Another admits the school benefits from being Cox’s alma mater. ‘I think it does,’ he says. ‘Certainly the fact Brian Cox is big news at the moment. I think it does help; it’s nice for us. He mentions us and that he mentioned Peter [Galloway] as an inspiration is nice. [The school] are still in touch with him and he has promised he will come back at some point, which would be fantastic, but he can’t commit himself that far in the future.’

  So, Cox left school with a keyboard under his arm and dreams of stardom. Little did he know it was brewing just down the round from his parents’ house.

  CHAPTER 3

  DARE TO WIN

  It’s not every day a rock star moves in round the corner from your house, especially if you lived near Oldham in the mid-1980s. So, word spread quickly when Darren Wharton, former keyboard player of legendary rock group Thin Lizzy, took ownership of a property close where Cox and his family lived. Not only that, but Wharton – a curly-haired, handsome man in his early- to mid-twenties – began drinking in the same pub as Brian’s father and before long, the former Lizzy-ite knew about the teenage Cox and his musical aspirations. We need to back up a bit first, though because the story of Dare, Cox’s real musical interlude from science and the band which almost deprived the BBC of its face of physics, starts a couple of years earlier.

  Lancastrian Darren Wharton was a keyboard player and songwriter who as a teenager had been discovered playing in Manchester nightclubs and was recruited by legendary rock’n’roll band Thin Lizzy to play in one of their latter incarnations. But as Lizzy frontman Phil
Lynott’s addictions took hold and the group disintegrated around 1984, Wharton found himself back in his hometown of Chadderton near Oldham, in a nice 18th-century farmhouse purchased from the proceeds of various rock records. Keen to make the transition to frontman and singer, Wharton turned down offers from other groups and signed a deal with Phonogram records as a solo artist. Following this, he set about putting together a band. He found lead guitarist Vinny Burns through a friend and the pair worked on material for about six months before beginning to sign up other members. Working under Wharton’s name, they hired Ed Stratton on drums and a BBC sound engineer with the single moniker Shelly on bass. They took photos and began rehearsing, but then Wharton’s deal with Phonogram fell through and the band found themselves without record company backing. Stratton was sacked – he didn’t get on with Shelly and also lived far away from the other guys in Northampton – and local lad Jim Ross drafted in on drums.

  Wharton was also keen to change the band’s name to something else. While at Donington, he bumped into Lemmy from Motorhead and confided in him. Lemmy suggested Dare 1. Wharton didn’t like the numeral, so dropped it and Dare was born. Burns and Wharton continued to write and record songs, doing a deal with a studio in Manchester whereby they would play for free on radio idents and jingles; in return, Dare would get to record or rehearse in the studio. Until now, Wharton had been singing from behind a keyboard, but he now wanted more freedom of movement and decided to hire a second keyboard player, while using Eighties staple the keytar (Wharton’s version, which he fashioned himself using lashings of gaffer tape was dubbed ‘The Batmobile’). A youngster called Mark Simpson was hired and the band, which was starting to pick up momentum locally, continued to gig furiously. Record companies began to take an interest and Chrysalis were potentially keen to sign them; the band travelled to London for a showcase but the head of A&R at Chrysalis wasn’t interested. They recorded several demos and found their manager, Keith Aspden after he was introduced to them by someone who worked in that studio. However, the band ended up going their separate ways.

  It was 1986 and Brian Cox was getting ready to go to university. He would drive around in his souped-up Ford Fiesta, listening to the music from Top Gun until he hit a lamp post and got charged for it by Oldham Council. He began listening to something more sedate. Aware of the rock star living round the corner and with a decent grasp of the keyboards, he had dropped a tape round to Wharton’s house a couple of years before. More importantly, Cox’s dad went to the same pub as the singer and had been round to his house a few times. ‘They talked about music,’ says fan Mick Taylor, whose love for the group led him to become head of the Dare fan club. When Mark Simpson left the band, Wharton remembered the tape he’d received and asked Cox Sr whether his son still played keyboards. With his spiky hair and sharp cheekbones, Cox certainly looked like a rock star. ‘I would say without a doubt Brian was the best-looking one,’ recalls Taylor. ‘You only need to look at pictures when he was in Dare and he was the heartthrob – he stood out like a sore thumb. My ex-missus said he was the best-looking!’

  Wharton offered Cox – five-and-a-half-years his junior – a place in the band. Though he still had dreams of being a scientist, the 18-year-old didn’t think it would be too bad to take a year off and give rock stardom a go. It turned out to be a lot longer. ‘You don’t miss physics when you’re 18, in a rock and roll band,’ he once reminisced. Surprisingly, his parents didn’t mind the diversion. ‘They were actually really supportive,’ he told Radio 4. ‘They loved watching us live. They came to Manchester Apollo to see us and really enjoyed the process – I think they were quite upset when the band split up and I went to university. I think they enjoyed their time in the rock and roll sun.’ The Maple Squash Club in Oldham, near the football ground, became the band’s home from home. They knew the owners, Allan and Rita, who let them rehearse free of charge and soon they had a Saturday night residency at the venue.

  ‘We used to go every week,’ remembers Oldham resident Tony Steel, an early Dare follower. ‘We got hooked. It was before the first album, so they used to do all the stuff from the first album at the gigs.’ Steel is just one of the many fans who fell in love with the group from the start. ‘It was quite a small room, quite a low ceiling,’ he says of the Squash Club, which held about 100 people. ‘It was a bar/restaurant – very close, very personal. It was a great atmosphere, because it was rock, but you could hear the music and the words they were singing.’ The audience tended to be around the same age as the band and despite the loud music and the alcohol on offer, there wasn’t any fighting. ‘It was the same people, week in week out,’ says Steel. ‘[The band] brought their friends. It was the same faces. Then it grew a little bit each week to the point where if you didn’t get there by eight o’clock, you didn’t get in.’

  The gigs were where the band honed their stage act. ‘Darren was confident because he had toured all over the world,’ recalls Steel. ‘Brian was a bit shy because he was the youngest one. He didn’t tend to speak – he stood in the back, hiding behind his keyboards. I remember him being quite shy compared to Darren Wharton and Vinny Burns. You could tell [Brian] was doing most of the keyboards. They all did little solo bits and you could tell he was actually playing it. He wasn’t just in the background for shows. He had long hair at the back and spiky on top. Not like punk spiky – the whole top was spiked up, a proper mullet – the usual Eighties band thing.’

  Cox himself remembers ‘long hair, hairspray, ripped jeans, leather jackets…’ He would become transfixed watching Wharton cover himself in what he thought was chip fat before shows. ‘He used to grease himself up and run around!’ he laughed. ‘We were very Eighties.’ Unlike many of the acts in those days, the keyboard set-up was pretty small. Some of this was to do with the fact they already had two keyboard players but also because they couldn’t really afford any equipment. Shelly had to borrow a bass before every gig. It wasn’t until their record deal that they could splash out on new gear and any fees collected from the early shows were used to pay for a van to travel to the venues. Sometimes they even had to resort to dubious means to get around the transportation issue. ‘When I first started publishing a fanzine for Dare, I advertised it in the music papers,’ explains Mick Taylor. ‘Not long afterwards, I got a letter that had been sent from Her Majesty’s Prison Strangeways in Manchester. It was from a loveable rogue called Ian McGiffen, who introduced himself as Dare’s road manager. He had got himself into some trouble, so was temporarily unavailable!

  ‘Ian has sadly passed away now, but he told me that one day he was on tour with Dare and they were due to travel to a gig one night but their van had broken down; they were stuck. Ian was one step ahead and told the guys not to worry. A couple of hours later, he turned up with this van saying he had borrowed it from a mate but had to have it back the same day. The guys loaded up the van and off they went. After the gig had finished, Ian dropped everyone off and took the van back to where he had stolen it, ha ha! Little did the band know they were travelling around in a stolen van! Ian was very proud of his time with Dare and Darren later wrote a song with him in mind called ‘Breakout’, which was on the band’s second album, Blood From Stone.’

  The Maple residency lasted almost 18 months and meanwhile the band continued to increase their following around the northwest. Cox dubbed them the ‘Oldham Bon Jovi’. They had a small crew, including Burns’ brother Russ and Ian McGiffen, and the shows were beginning to feel slicker, with good sound and a quality light show. In fact, they even managed to swing a 12-day tour of Hong Kong after a photographer friend lied to a promoter about who they were. It was only the second time Cox had been abroad (the first was a school ski trip). They did some gigs and appeared on a local TV show before heading back, where they were greeted with increased record company interest. It was the first time Cox appeared on television, smiling shyly from behind his keyboards. Amazingly, it looked like his dreams of becoming a rock star might just come true – and
sooner than he thought.

  ‘I wouldn’t say it was dead easy,’ says Mick Taylor, but by all accounts three companies were fighting to land the band’s signature. EMI came to see them at a gig in Oldham and then MCA checked out a concert at the Maple Squash Club. RCA and A&M got wind that both labels were interested, so immediately headed up to watch the group perform the following week. Convinced they had found the next big thing, A&M told the boys to forget the rest and drew up an eight-album deal. In May 1987, Cox was a member of a band with a record deal and any ideas of becoming a scientist would have to be put on hold.

  Though Dare had acquired a reputation as a formidable local live act, all they had to show for it as far as recordings went were some demos. ‘It was before mobile phones, so you couldn’t record it and play it back as you could do now,’ explains Tony Steel. There were live bootlegs kicking around, but not many. A&M were keen to get an album in the bag and into the shops, so they introduced the lads to Mike Shipley and Larry Klein, the duo who would produce their first album. Shipley was an Australian who had moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and worked with hundreds of acts as a sound engineer, including AC/DC and The Clash. Klein was a former session bass player, who had married folk singer Joni Mitchell and moved into producing. Dare had plenty of tracks ready to go – in fact, they already had the core of their first record. In January 1988, they all piled, hungover, into Cox’s Ford Fiesta and headed off to Hookend Manor in Berkshire, a mansion formerly owned by Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour that had since become a favourite recording haunt of music labels. They laid down some tracks, but the producers decided they needed to finish off the album in LA, so the band headed out there. It didn’t take much persuasion.