The Wonder of Brian Cox Read online

  Cox’s first school was Chadderton Hall, a good primary and literally adjacent to his house. The family home was next door to the playing fields for the school and though he wasn’t supposed to, he used to climb over the fence to get there in the mornings and after lunch. Cox always enjoyed his schooling, even then academia appealed. However, he did have something he wanted to raise with those who had created the curriculum. ‘One thing I wasn’t happy about at junior school was that I wanted to have physics lessons but you didn’t get specific science lessons until you were senior school,’ he explained. ‘My interest in physics and astronomy came from outside school.’ Nevertheless, he indulged his geeky interests in other ways. ‘Believe it or not, the head at my junior school was called Mr Perfect,’ he told The Times. ‘He was brilliant. He ran after-school classes in maths and English, and let kids stay on to play board games. When we played Risk, we would discuss each move and only make one or two moves a week, so one game would go on all term.’

  Cox looks back with fondness on what he got up to as a child, inevitably turning to a scientific reference, albeit a science fiction one, to illustrate his point. ‘As a geek, I like Star Trek,’ he told Discovery.com. ‘There’s a very famous Star Trek episode where Captain Picard goes back in time and he gets the opportunity to tell himself as a teenager how he should behave, don’t make these mistakes that you made, don’t get in this car and crash it, and then he goes back to real life and he’s not a captain anymore, he’s just some useless guy who cleans the bathroom on the Enterprise. And that’s a really vital lesson, I think: you are what you are and if you like where you’ve got to, then you don’t know which little bits of behaviour when you were a kid got you there. So I wouldn’t change anything, because I’m quite happy with where I’ve got to. Even though I did some silly things, maybe they’re the things that allowed me not to do them in the future.’

  CHAPTER 2

  SCHOOL

  At the age of 11, it was time to go to senior school. Just three miles or so away from Chadderton, just off Chamber Road, south of Oldham was Oldham Hulme Grammar School – a private school, which was divided in two for boys and girls. A giant wooden door ostensibly separated the two sexes. Though both of Cox’s parents had good jobs, it was still something of a struggle to pay the fees. ‘They couldn’t afford it, really – I think my grandparents chipped in,’ he told the Guardian. ‘I don’t know how expensive it was relative to wages, but it was a huge thing for them to do that. But it was a great source of pride, I think, that my dad had passed the 11+ and gone to grammar school and got A-levels. And I think he wanted me to go to grammar school, basically – if it had been free. It’s a classic 20th-century story, but when you read, now, that that kind of route has been closed off for people, that we’re less socially mobile than we ever were, it’s tragic.’

  Though the fabric of the school has been around since 1611, the Oldham Hulme Grammar School opened on its current site in 1895. Hidden down College Lane, it is set in a suburban area, austere but welcoming. The buildings sit atop a hill, looking out over a factory chimney, which extends from the valley below. A long driveway weaves its way through to the main reception, a small football pitch in front, the library block outside. Varnished brown panelling lines the walls and a poster of Oldham the dog – given to Robert Scott for his last, doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1910 – is nailed proudly to a pillar in the main hall. It feels academically stimulating, buzzy – the kind of place where ex-pupils return as teachers. Television actress Sarah Lancashire attended the girls’ school (and actually overlapped with Cox by a couple of years); journalist and presenter John Stapleton graduated from there in the early 1960s. Described by Cox as ‘a traditional boys’ school’, alumni speak with enthusiasm of English masters who wore their university gowns and were nicknamed ‘Batman’ and terrifying chemistry teachers. ‘It was a very good school, but quite old-fashioned,’ says Tim Haughton, an old school friend of Cox. ‘There were some very unusual characters, teacher-wise – very out of the mould of those old films, the strange professor. People who wouldn’t have fitted into a private school setting, but wouldn’t have fitted in at a comprehensive either.’

  The boy’s uniform was typical: a black blazer with school badge, white shirt, dark trousers, grey socks and black shoes (the tie depended on the house you were in). Echoing public school, boys were divided into different ‘houses’ as a means of encouraging competition and for ease of classroom streaming. It was just one of the ways that the former grammar school showed off its private school status. ‘The kids were generally middle-class,’ Haughton adds, ‘although there were people on assisted places but generally a well-to-do background.’ While in 1979 not everyone went on to the sixth form and university, Oldham Hulme had a good scholastic reputation and fostered curricular and extra-curricular development. Nowadays, the music rooms are inundated with synthesisers, but this wasn’t the case in the early 1980s. The physics labs – where Cox spent much of his time – were crowded with scientific experiments, Bunsen burners and oscilloscopes; the desks arranged in a horseshoe shape in front of where the teacher stood.

  When Cox arrived at the school he was already focused on pursuing science – he hadn’t had the opportunity at Chadderton Hall and was itching to go once he hit senior school. ‘Initially, you were split in classes by your house,’ remembers Haughton. ‘It was only when you got to 13, 14, that the classes got much more integrated – you could opt into certain lesion and opt out of them.’ Determined to concentrate on the scientific disciplines, Cox quickly saw no need for French and dropped the subject, something he now regrets. ‘I refused to speak French because I said it wasn’t science,’ he says. ‘And then I ended up working in Geneva [at CERN], where they speak French, so…’ He joked that if he had continued with the foreign language then he would have been able to order meals at his workplace.

  By all accounts, he kept himself to himself during the first couple of years at Oldham Hulme, concentrating on plane spotting. Because of his grandparents’ and parents’ sacrifice, he didn’t like getting detentions and was careful not to disappoint. ‘Certainly my impression of him over the first couple of years when our paths did cross was that he was just very quiet, quite studious, just very involved in cracking on with school work,’ says Haughton. However, things began to change seriously around the age of 15. Cox had always been interested in music, especially the technological side, as we have since seen. His mother asked him to chaperone his sister Sandra to see Duran Duran play a concert in Leeds. ‘It was the Seven and the Ragged Tiger tour,’ he recalled. ‘I thought, that looks brilliant, so I learned to play the keyboards.’

  In fact, Duran Duran ended up being the first band he got into in a big way. Years later after he became famous, he met band member Nick Rhodes socially a number of times to talk about CERN and quantum theory, and they ended up as friends. It took him several meetings before he felt able to reveal the level of his fandom, though. Rhodes just laughed. ‘Although I’d seen concerts before, this was the first Beatlemania-type thing – that atmosphere of screaming girls,’ he explained. ‘So I was just blown away by this spectacle and that’s the moment I thought I want to be a pop star. So, the first thing to deflect me from the geeky pursuits of physics.’

  The keyboards appealed to Cox’s scientific nature. It was the early 1980s and electronic sounds were beginning to dominate the records in the charts. But he never took lessons (although the school did offer piano tuition) and instead taught himself. ‘I was good at programming the keyboards,’ he told Shortlist, ‘but I never saw myself as a musician.’ Around this time, he began listening to Billy Joel’s ‘New York State Of Mind’. ‘When I started really wanting to play the piano, Billy Joel and Elton John were two big influences because I used to sit there and play along to these songs,’ he told Kirsty Young on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. ‘If I sit down at a piano and I can’t think of anything to do, then I play “New York State Of Mind.”’


  At the age of 11, he and a friend had listened to Ultravox and Kraftwerk mainly because of the electronic nature, but now Cox began to see the music, or rather pop stardom, as being a pathway to fame, fortune and girls. Enamoured of the techniques that went into creating the music, he immediately formed a band with a friend who lived up the road. Electronic music in those days was a geeky hobby and he tried to replicate the sounds generated by the band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) on their first album, Messages. OMD was the first concert he ever attended. He found a sympathetic partner in physics master Peter Galloway, who he later described to The Times as being his favourite teacher. ‘Though he looked like a Seventies’ physicist, complete with beard, Mr Galloway was very young, relaxed and different from most of the other teachers,’ Cox remembered. ‘What was great is you could sit down with him after school and say “I want to build this piece of electronics” and he would help you. One of the bands we liked was Ultravox and they had found a way to trigger chords on a keyboard to make it syncopate with a hi-hat drum. We wanted to make the same noise and needed to build something called a “noise gate” that would be triggered by the hi-hat. We asked Mr Galloway about it and he sat down and drew a circuit. Then we built the circuit with him and it worked. Years later I met Billy Currie, the keyboard player with Ultravox, and told him: “We had to build this thing with our physics teacher.” And he said: “I know, I did the same.” It was the only solution at the time for making that sound.’

  It was also ironic considering one of his future bandmates in the group Dare, Vinny Burns, also went on to play with Ultravox. Peter Galloway was in his first year of teaching when he came across Cox. ‘Brian was in his first year in the sixth form when I started teaching him,’ he says. ‘I remember him well – he always looked very boyish and he still looks just the same. To a certain extent he was just like all the other boys – sometimes he didn’t do his homework or would be talking in class – but he wasn’t at all bad. He was very inquisitive and bright, and seemed very keen on the topic.’

  With music on his mind, it’s no surprise that Cox started hanging out with a new crowd. He became a huge fan of David Bowie, especially the musician’s 1971 album, Hunky Dory. In 2011, he chose ‘Queen Bitch’ as one of his songs on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, saying: ‘It always has been my favourite album for as long as I can remember. The musicianship is brilliant. Rick Wakeman, who’s one of my favourite piano players, plays on the album. I could have chosen any track on Hunky Dory.’ He also began buying 7” singles. One of the first was The Jam’s “Going Underground”. ‘I must have been asking my mum and dad for the money,’ he recalled. ‘I absolutely loved it, played it over and over again. And I think it not only stands up, it’s still brilliant.’

  Tim Haughton remembers Oldham Hulme Grammar as being pretty disciplined and as you might imagine, it became a case of seeing how hard the students could push against those boundaries. ‘The boys and the girls weren’t supposed to mix,’ he says, ‘although we often tried to do so. People would meet halfway down a driveway and chat before you got caught and sent on your way.’ Cox began mixing with a gang of boys who lived in the Saddleworth/Uppermill area and it was there that he came into contact with Haughton in a more social setting. ‘You didn’t just change groups because your friends changed, it tended to be what you were into,’ adds Haughton. ‘And we were all into the New Romantic thing. We went down the route of winklepicker shoes, long hair, big flickers [quiffed hair] – pants were a bit baggy in the top, bit tight in the bottom, that kind of thing. Brian had gone down that whole route: he had the big flicker, winklepicker shoes. He came out of his shell a little bit, started mingling more with the girls’ school. Girls became a much more important facet of our everyday life, as did finding an off licence that would sell you a sneaky bottle of beer!’

  Cox and his friends followed the music of Duran Duran, Roxy Music and The Human League. Haughton remembers them trying to emulate the hair of Phil Oakey, lead singer of the latter band. ‘I used to have a huge flicker, but [Brian’s] was there or thereabouts,’ he laughs. ‘We were competing.’ At the same time, they started to embellish their school uniform: the tie got shorter and shorter, the trousers more fashionable. Though they were supposed to buy their clothes from specific local shops, they ignored the rules and concentrated on what was trendy. ‘I seem to remember Brian having a cracking pair of winklepicker shoes, which had a longer point on them than anybody else’s,’ says Haughton.

  Even though Cox was beginning to rebel a bit more, school work remained important, as did not getting in trouble. ‘I regarded him as one of the really clever ones,’ says classmate Joanne Smithies. ‘I don’t remember him to ever be in trouble – just a good kid, really.’ He hung out in a group of around ten kids, who stuck pretty close together, but continued to enjoy his studies, especially those taught by people who had a unique perspective on teaching and indeed life. Few were quite as unique as Stephen ‘Sam’ Bell, a school legend who taught chemistry, though. Most were terrified of him and ditched the class when they heard they were to be taught by him. Someone who made lots of money as an amateur stock trader and paid for many extra-curricular activities in the school out of his own pocket (including the film club where Cox, aged 11, had seen Alien) as well as donating a Steinway piano and a harpsichord, Mr Bell stuck in Cox’s mind during an interview with The Times. ‘He was a perfectionist,’ he recalled. ‘You had to do everything very precisely. He used to go mental if anyone did anything wrong and practical experiments could clash with his control-freakery. If anyone sprayed copper sulphate out of a test tube, he would scream and throw people out of a lesson. When you were 11, you would all be frightened to death of him but by the time you were 15, everyone was fond of him because he was so strange. He would horrify educationalists today but he got amazing results. His approach was quite modern because he taught you to pass the exam with precision.’

  While Cox was still conscientious in the classroom, away from it he was beginning to explore what it meant to be a teenager. Part of this coincided with both his grandparents dying when he was 14; he dabbled with dying his hair purple and becoming a Goth. ‘I wonder now whether I’d have considered being in a band or gone through the Goth stage if they’d not died,’ he told the Daily Mail. ‘My sister tells me I was quite a handful.’ Says Tim Haughton: ‘On the outskirts of the school we had what you call the Maths wing, which was a prefab building of four classrooms. Teachers didn’t tend to venture there that much during lunch hours and breaks, so that’s where everyone tended to go to smoke and try and hook up with girls. Nearby to that was a driveway that ran the full length of the school and either end was where you could have contact with the girls from the girls’ school. That was the place you tended to congregate when you got older.’

  Despite living so close to a thriving metropolis like Manchester, Cox’s social life didn’t tend to stretch that far. ‘Oldham was grim,’ recalls Haughton. ‘You didn’t have places to go; you didn’t have bowling alleys. You had cinemas but they were horrible, old crappy places. If I went into Manchester, it was at the weekend and I told them I was going into Oldham, and Oldham was a bit of a push. We didn’t have the facility to have big adventures as such; you were very limited as to what you could do. You were relying on people’s parents going out to have a sneaky party. When you look back, it would be awful to say we were nondescript but we were all just trying make fun in a fairly grim town; that one of the gang has gone on to bigger and better things is phenomenal.’ Parties were generally local. ‘It was a group of lads who lived around Saddleworth, Greenfield, that neck of the woods,’ Haughton explains. ‘More often than not, you went to somebody’s house. If I look back now, we seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in what was called Mumps Bus Station. When I look back now, I couldn’t tell you why we spent so much time there. It was under cover, but it was grim and there was no way we spent that much time there waiting for a bus.’

  With
his baby face, Cox didn’t have much luck when it came to buying alcohol and required a bit more subterfuge. ‘There was an off licence on Huddersfield Road, it was a bit of a walk for us,’ Haughton continues. ‘But you could go in with a little note that one of you’d written saying “Please will you let my son buy 20 Benson & Hedges”. Or “please accept this letter as permission to sell my son a bottle of wine, which I require for my own purposes”. Absolute nonsense! That’s what we used to do. We’d spend amounts of time wandering along to shops we knew would sell us cigarettes or booze. We’d probably hang around outside arguing who was going in, who looked the oldest, who would get served – and basically panicking about it.’

  There were also women. ‘You’ve got to imagine at 14, 15 years old, the girls are starting to be interesting and you’ve been separated from them by this door that you know leads into their school, but you’re never allowed to go through it,’ adds Haughton. ‘Suddenly, you’re getting invited to a party and you’re mixing together. It’s like somebody’s dropped a hormone bomb – that’s what it was like. I don’t remember anyone having steady girlfriends. Maybe when you’re 17, 18, you had steadier girlfriends. But [before] it was a case of you went to a party and met somebody, snogged them, felt them up a little bit. They were your girlfriend for a couple of weeks and then it was somebody else – it was a very fluid situation.’

  Though Haughton cannot remember specifics about Cox’s longer-term female friends (‘There probably are a couple of stories which I wouldn’t tell you because it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to do so! A gentleman never tells.’), one incident does stick out in his mind. ‘I remember him snogging this girl on the back of the bus one night coming out of Oldham, heading back towards Greenfield. What’s the polite way to put this? She wasn’t particularly attractive, but she was known to be, er, quite easy. I seem to remember she had vaguely ginger hair, I suppose you’d call it strawberry blonde now. I’ve got a real feeling her name was Katherine. I should clarify when we were 15/16, easy wasn’t getting your pants off. Easy was letting you have a feel over the bra and over the top – that was considered a result. I’m not suggesting she was legs akimbo on the back seat of the bus,’ he laughs. ‘Those girls tended to be particularly popular.’