The Wonder of Brian Cox Read online

  They stayed at the Sheraton Miramar in Santa Monica and recorded at Joni Mitchell’s property in Bel Air. ‘It was really fantastic,’ recalled Cox. But it wasn’t all rock’n’roll. During a day off, the band decided to visit Disneyland, south of the city. They drove their hire car down there and parked it in one of the huge parking lots. After enjoying the rides, they returned to pick up their car, only they couldn’t recall where they had parked it. Remembering the area for parked cars was the ‘size of Leeds’, Cox has said: ‘all we knew was that it was red!’ He added: ‘We had to wait until everyone had gone home and there was nothing left in the parking lot. And then they drove us around until we saw a red car. We had to wait until about midnight. That’s rock and roll, isn’t it? Lost in Disneyland!’

  In those days, it was also crucial to make a video to accompany a single and with ‘Abandon’ chosen as the first song to be released off the debut album, the band returned to Los Angeles in August of the same year to shoot the promo. It was filmed in South Central LA, a down-at-heel part of downtown (especially so in 1988) and features the group rocking out against an industrial backdrop and lots of dry ice. Somewhat inexplicably, a sexy young woman (actually future Twin Peaks star Mädchen Amick, who would go on to become a successful TV actress in particular) meanders about, showing off her cleavage before climbing into a fancy car, supposedly having been abandoned. The video ends with the guys walking off into a smoke-filled distance. Cox doesn’t get all that much screen time as it is mainly focused on Wharton and Burns but there’s a moment when he can definitely be seen grinning. Considering what he might have been doing at the time had he not been shooting a rock video, it’s unsurprising.

  A&M unveiled the band before the press on 25 October 1988 at The Marquee Club in Soho. As this was the group’s debut London show, they were understandably nervous. It wasn’t helped by a poor sound mix, which often drowned out the vocals. The record company were careful to mix the media in with a group of supporters from Manchester, so that it wasn’t simply an anodyne showcase. Journalist Valerie Potter – a self-confessed Dare fan – was there and wrote: ‘The band were obviously rigid with nerves and this made their performance a little shaky until they got into their stride. Nevertheless, I still stoutly maintain that this band is one to watch for in ’89. Second keyboard player Brian Cox puts in some sterling support from the back of the stage. There are still some rough edges that need to be smoothed away by regular gigging, but now that Dare have leapt over the hurdle of the “debut London show”, on their next London appearance, I think they’ll show us what they can really do.’

  The band thought they had done a decent job. Vinny Burns later wrote: ‘We played it very safe and it felt more like being in a goldfish bowl than any of the other good Marquee gigs that we would play later on. The press seemed to go on more about the fact that A&M had done an over-the-top free bar for guests – we couldn’t even get served with free drinks ourselves, it was that packed. We knew we would be footing the bill for it all in the long run; we made sure that didn’t happen again. Still, it was good to play the Marquee and it was a good gig, too.’

  ‘Abandon’ was the first single to be released but it didn’t do very well, only reaching No. 99 in the charts when it originally came out (it spent two weeks getting to No. 71 when re-released in July, the following year). It had a couple of champions, though and for the fans, this felt like the start of great things. ‘It was a real shock to the system first time we heard it on the radio,’ remembers fan Tony Steel. ‘We started hearing it on Radio 1. There was a teatime DJ, Gary Davies. I remember him saying he was going to play something from a new band and it was one of the best intros he’d ever heard. That was “Abandon” and it is a fantastic intro.’ The fact that they were a local band made good made it all the more special for those who had been there right from the beginning. ‘It was like, “I know these, I used to go and watch these,”’ adds Steel. ‘It was quite a proud moment in that we’d helped them get there. If we hadn’t gone to watch them, they would have never made it – we felt part of the success.’

  And the fans weren’t the only ones who were shocked. ‘Obviously there was a big fuss about him joining the group and having a single coming out,’ says school friend, Tim Haughton. ‘At the time, everyone thought it was a load of bullshit, to be honest with you. Everyone thought he was just talking it up and it would never happen, blowing his own trumpet. And then obviously it happened and everyone was like, “oh my God, he’s telling the truth!” One thing you’ve got in a school like that is you’ve a lot of intelligent people, there’s a lot of egos involved – you couldn’t go a week without someone starting a band, but a week later it had all dissolved into nothing. So, when someone says “I’m in this band, we’re going to be bringing a single out, we’re going into the studio and recording some songs”, everyone goes “yeah, great, what a lot of bullshit!” When it actually happened, everyone was gobsmacked.’

  The album, titled Out of the Silence, was released not long afterwards. Because of a quirk in the Gallup charting system, which said only certain stores were counted as being valid for sales, it didn’t make the charts. Fans have pointed out that 89 per cent of the LP’s sales came from the Greater Manchester area and sometimes it was selling up to 300 copies per day. If that was the case, it would have been a Top Five record. It received positive reviews from the music press, with Jon Hotten in heavy metal bible Kerrang! giving it four and three-quarter stars out of five. ‘Dare have everything,’ he wrote. ‘Songs, instrumentation, production, but most of all they have that indefinable X ingredient that sets them apart and above the rest. Take “Abandon”, build around rich keyboards and vocal hooks that will tear you apart, but the album’s high point is without a doubt “Under the Sun”, a supreme example of dramatic atmosphere and how to create it around a lilting, minor-key piano accompaniment. Dare are there to be awed and AOR fans will lap it up. As a genre piece this excels and I love it. Don’t miss it.’

  Elsewhere, the keyboards parts were described as ‘shimmering’ while another critic added: ‘the keyboards and guitars blended together nicely’. The album went Top 20 in Sweden and Cox’s youthful looks were noticed by some writers: ‘The man with the perpetual grin and baby face, which makes me wonder if he’ll ever start shaving,’ scribbled one hack. During live shows, Wharton continued to play his keytar, mainly because of the rich keyboard sounds on the album. ‘It was either that or use tapes,’ he told one magazine. ‘Brian couldn’t physically play what was on the album alone.’ Some articles go so far to suggest that Cox mostly played the rhythm lines on the record, while Wharton did the majority of the lead solo work. Certainly he did some solos while onstage, but it’s clear Cox did pull his weight. ‘It was more Darren and Vinny who wrote the songs,’ says fan club chief and aficionado Mick Taylor. ‘But I did go to watch them in the studios once, I think it was called The Greenhouse Studios, when they were rehearsing. You’d get Brian adding a little keyboard part and saying “what do you think of this?” So in a way, he was involved, putting his ideas in. But it was actually Darren and Vinny who wrote all the songs.’

  For Cox, life was good. And the band was tight: despite their growing success, they remained good Northern boys at heart. One fan called Rob Till remembers missing his train after a gig, when the guys allowed him to sleep on the floor of their hotel. There were girls, too. Says Mick Taylor: ‘Obviously, there were groupies and that sort of thing.’ They indulged as you might expect, but Cox later insisted it was not so hardcore as some of their heavy metal contemporaries. ‘There were a few [groupies],’ he said, ‘although I was probably too naïve to notice at the time – I probably would have made more use if I had been older.’ He told Shortlist: ‘We were just a bunch of lads from Oldham who got a deal. If you’re 20 years old and you get plonked in the middle of LA with an expenses account, you’re going to have a drink, aren’t you? It was all quite innocent, really. I never crashed my Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool or a
nything – I had a rusty Ford Fiesta. And no pool to drive it into.’

  With the advance they received, they paid themselves £75 a week and gradually increased this to £120. ‘We thought – “my God, we’ve made it!”’ They favoured Henry’s Wine Bar in Manchester and even impressed George Harrison. ‘After a gig one night we were sat in a bar and [Darren] saw this guy pushing in, so he told him to f*** off,’ Cox told Metro. ‘It was George Harrison. George said, “I haven’t been told to f*** off since 1965” and was so impressed, he bought us all a drink.’

  Taylor, later the boss of their fan club, met the band around this time. ‘I was working at MFI in Rochdale,’ he remembers. ‘Me and my friend used to swap tapes with each other. One day he left a tape on my desk by Dare, who I’d never heard of. I listened to the tape and it was brilliant, so I asked him who they were. He said his wife’s cousin was called Darren Wharton and used to be in Thin Lizzy. I got that much into them that I started making a scrapbook. I went to see them live at a gig in Oldham. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me backstage, but I was with my friend and he was, so I left my scrapbook with him and asked if he could get the band to sign it. The next day at work, my friend said they were impressed with my scrapbook and next time I went to a gig, I should go and introduce myself. So that’s what I did. I went on tour with them and managed to get backstage passes all the time. In the end, Darren Wharton asked me if I’d run the fan club.’

  Though Taylor tended to mix primarily with Wharton and Burns, he grew to know the rest of the band as well. ‘When I first met all of them, they were all quite young,’ he says. ‘Brian was the youngest in the band and the shy one, really. I wouldn’t expect in a million years that years later he’d be “Professor Brian Cox”. Back then no one knew that Brian was into science or what he was doing – he was just seen as a pop idol, if you know what I mean. He wasn’t the most talkative one. Obviously I did talk to Brian, but he was the quiet one in the band. I wouldn’t say it was hard to get him into a conversation, but he’d only answer questions that you asked him. It wasn’t that he was miserable – I think it was because I got myself more involved with Darren and Vinny and the other three members were in the background. It was a “hiya”, a shake of the hand and a nod of the head.’

  A&M were keen to get the band playing more venues around the UK and abroad – especially on the continent, where rock music was particularly popular. In November 1988, they were sent out as a support act for Jimmy Page, ex-guitarist of Led Zeppelin for his UK dates. Neonbubble.com posted a humorous interview with Cox, in which he described his favourite hotel, talking about a place he stayed in while on tour with Page in Newcastle. ‘I can’t remember the name of the hotel but let me tell you this: mirrors on both sides of the bathroom!’ he said. ‘Luxury! You could look in one and see a reflection, and a reflection of a reflection and so on. In fact, I tried an experiment there by waving and seeing how long it would be before the distant reflections waved back – it was a test of the speed of light and how drunk I was – but some of the reflections didn’t wave at all and I got scared. That’s when I knew I’d never watch Poltergeist 3 again. And the towels were really fluffy – stole two.’

  For the group, playing with Page was something of a dream come true, especially at the Manchester Apollo, the scene of many gigs they had watched as teenagers. They even got to see how realistic Spinal Tap was at a concert in Birmingham. ‘We did our set [at the Hummingbird],’ wrote Vinny Burns. ‘Jimmy came to our dressing room to say he enjoyed our show. He went out of the door and was about to walk down the steps to the stage (his intro was running). Darren shouted, “Have a good one, Jimmy!” and as he turned round to say thanks, he fell down the stairs. Oops! We were waiting to be booted off the tour but everything was fine.’

  It’s hard to quantify just how successful Dare were in those early days but they had a solid live following. ‘If you went to a gig, the queues would be right round the block,’ says Mick Taylor. ‘I can’t understand why they weren’t huge. When we went to a Dare gig, it was brilliant. They’d get the crowd going and everyone was bouncing around – it was like a personal gig, in a way. It wasn’t like the stage was forty feet away and they were up twenty feet: they were there and you could actually touch the band.’ As well as their live reputation, Out of the Silence sold an impressive 50,000 copies in America (‘quite big, considering they were an unknown band,’ explains Taylor). And the critics liked them. Yet for some reason they didn’t quite break through.

  ‘I asked Darren why they didn’t go to the States to advertise their CD, but he said it was down to management,’ says Taylor. ‘They had poor management, really – that’s why they didn’t go to the States, or it might have been a different story today.’ The singles, too never really took off in the UK. ‘In England, the singles they released off the [first] CD did get in the low regions of the charts. It’s a shame, really but they were a good band and they had a great following.’ A second single, ‘The Raindance’, was released and got to No. 62 in the charts in April 1989. Distributed as a 7” gatefold vinyl, it featured five profile cards with trivia about the band members. Cox listed his pastimes as ‘squash, running and eating’. And despite being rock stars, he did retain some of his middle-class roots, playing squash with Wharton most mornings, since they only lived half a mile apart in Chadderton.

  The band continued to work hard. ‘They did gig constantly,’ recalls Taylor. ‘I was surprised because when I first got into them, I’d go to one gig and think that’s it for another few months and then I’d be walking around Manchester and there would be an advert for another.’ While Brian and the guys were having fun, it never got too crazy. ‘We weren’t very rock and roll,’ Cox told the Sun. ‘The closest I got to mayhem was throwing a tea tray out of a window in a hotel room in Carlisle. We were only on the first floor and the teapot just bounced off the pavement next to a bemused passer-by. And we made sure to carefully open and close the window.’

  The hotel was The Crown & Mitre in the city centre. So un-rock’n’roll was this particular episode that no one can remember it happening. ‘Roy, who worked here at the time, know who the band is,’ said a hotel spokesperson, ‘but doesn’t remember anyone doing that.’ A&M booked them a slot as the openers for Swedish rockers Europe, then riding high in the charts with the follow-up to their mega-selling album, The Final Countdown. The 58-date Out of this World tour saw Dare tour across the continent, playing to packed stadiums of more than 12,000 people in places like Paris and Stockholm. ‘This was one of the best times I have had on the road,’ wrote Vinny Burns. ‘The guys from Europe and all their crew were amazing. In over four months, there were no arguments between bands and the general vibe was a four-month party.’

  The tour helped to improve Dare as a live outfit as they got used to the bigger venues. Wharton stopped using the Batmobile and being able to run around the stage meant their stage presence became even better. Shelly hooked up with Europe’s wardrobe lady, while Cox got his second taste of televisual fame when one of the concerts was broadcast on RTL in Germany. At the last gig, Dare ran up onstage to cover the headliners in cream as a practical joke. And while no one following the band knew particularly of Cox’s scientific inclination, it was clear that despite his musically enforced hiatus, it was never a subject far from his mind. ‘I remember Brian Cox with his big smile and an inquisitive mind trying to figure out the science behind the famous “Final Countdown” keyboard sound,’ says Europe frontman and founder Joey Tempest. ‘A very humble and warm individual.’

  The tour reached Britain in late March 1989, with dates at the Birmingham NEC and London Hammersmith Odeon. A&M released another single, “Nothing Is Stronger Than Love”, which didn’t chart. But the band were getting itchy feet about recording new material: while on tour, they had been writing new songs and were keen to put them on tape. There was also something of a split within the group. Bass player Shelly and drummer Jim Ross appeared to have fallen out of favour with the res
t of the band and ended up being replaced. In an interview with Hot Metal, Cox revealed: ‘By the time the final split came, Darren, Vinny and I had recorded about seven new songs, playing all the instruments between us.’ Nigel Clutterbuck was brought in on bass, while Greg Morgan took over the drummer’s slot.

  Searching for a more layered sound, especially onstage, a young graduate from the Salford College of Music called Richard Dews was also hired as an extra guitarist. Cox survived the cull. ‘He was very popular with Darren,’ says Mick Taylor. ‘In Darren’s eyes it was Darren, Vinny and Brian – they were good friends.’ Certainly, Cox was now considered one of the senior members of the band despite still being only just into his twenties. And he was keen to affirm that the new line-up only made Dare stronger. ‘The whole band is so tight now, too,’ he said. ‘When we rehearse, we hardly need to do much of the old stuff because it’s all there. We tend to concentrate more on developing new material, which we are hoping to do in the new set.’ The band had been hinting at a different, heavier sound during their gigs, showcasing the new song ‘Breakout’. They were also playing some Thin Lizzy covers. ‘The crowd seemed to like it,’ he said. ‘I think it’s just good fun. We’re certainly now trading off the memory of Lizzy and considering Darren was in the band, we’ve got every right to perform a couple of their numbers.’