The Wonder of Brian Cox Read online

  ‘Darren thought the crowd wanted them to go heavier,’ says Taylor. ‘Out of the Silence was more melodic rock, but Blood From Stone was heavy.’ Blood From Stone was the group’s sophomore effort and on top of a harder sound, also had elements of a Celtic influence, which would feed into the group’s later records. It was recorded in Los Angeles with famed producer Keith Olsen, the man behind smash hits such as Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again’ and Rick Springfield’s ‘Jessie’s Girl’ and released in September 1991. A&M said: ‘On a far heavier and unequivocally more representative album, [Dare] dispel for good the ill-fitting AOR title from their collective shoulders. The British have a fine musical tradition and when that tradition is enhanced by a passionate emerald hue, then you know that not only are you in for a consummate musical treat, but also that one of the very finest exponents is Dare.’

  The critics were generally positive. It received four stars in Kerrang!, which wrote: ‘Darren Wharton and guitarist Vinny Burns have retained only keyboards man Brian Cox (who doesn’t have an awful lot to do anymore!).’ The first single was ‘We Don’t Need A Reason’, which was released a month earlier in August 1991 and reached No. 52. It was their highest-charting single. During an interview, one journalist compared Blood From Stone to the work of metal group Skid Row, much to the consternation of the band. ‘It doesn’t sound like Skid Row,’ opined Wharton, with Cox adding: ‘it doesn’t say “fook” on it 18 times either!’

  Meanwhile, they were still incredibly popular around their hometown. Fans flocked to the Golden Disc in Hilton Arcade to have albums, posters, jackets and more signed by the band and to catch a glimpse of the new line-up when the single ‘Real Love’ was released in October 1991. It spent one week in the chart at No. 67. Cox talked of a return to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in Oldham for a homecoming concert, which would far outstrip their previous performances there. They even tried to emulate the likes of Def Leppard, who had created alter egos for themselves, forcing one game journalist to call Cox ‘Corky’ throughout an interview.

  Despite their protestations, it became clear that the end was nigh, though. ‘A&M had done as much as they could and nothing was happening,’ explains Mick Taylor. ‘Then the manager left.’ In retrospect, Wharton realised Blood From Stone’s new sound hadn’t really worked. ‘I hate to say it but we were all sheep back then,’ he said subsequently. ‘Looking back, it was definitely the wrong thing to do. We should have had the maturity not to jump on the bandwagon. As far as Dare are concerned, Blood From Stone was too much of a change in direction and we suffered for it in the end, really.’

  The constant touring was beginning to take its toll, too. One time, a roadie called Drac led a team which ended up with Cox gaffer-taped to a lighting rig for over an hour. ‘I was probably not behaving in a way deemed appropriate for a member of a band in the presence of road crew,’ said Cox. ‘I think I was just being a general, you know, pain. [Drac] was the tour manager, so he ordered the rest of the crew to put me on the ground, gaffer me up into a ball, put a harness on and then attach me to a lighting rig at the Hammersmith Odeon.’ Asked whether he could remember what drove them to it, Cox replied: ‘It was a build-up of absolute annoyance over many weeks.’ The final tipping point came in Berlin. ‘It was a proper fight,’ said Cox. ‘We were drunk and tired, and everyone just jumped on one another.’ He elaborated to Shortlist: ‘We’d been touring for four years and we were sick of each other. We all threw a few punches in a half-hearted way. Nobody’s nose got broken; it was slapping, mainly – like those fights that footballers have. But it was enough to split up the band.’

  A&M were on the verge of dropping Dare anyway because Blood From Stone was a massive change and it didn’t do well at all.’ Indeed, the album spent one week in the charts and got to No. 48. Wharton has suggested that A&M were bought by Polygram and that’s why they were left out in the cold (in a strange echoing of his solo deal with Phonogram), but it didn’t really matter: the record company dropped them and it was decision-making time. News of Burns’ exit hit the music papers but was relayed to the heartbroken fans, along with a sad editorial about the split from A&M, in Dare’s official fanzine #8. The edition also added: ‘Brien (sic) is also leaving Dare! The reason for Brien (sic) leaving is that he is going to university some time this year, so we all wish Brian the best of luck, cheers mate.’

  At first, despite Vinny leaving, it appeared that Cox would stick with Dare because Wharton suggested in an interview that he would continue working with the other members of the band. However, it’s clear that once A&M got wind of the lead guitarist’s departure and decided to terminate their contract, Cox decided it was time to get back to his academic pathway: ‘I just decided that I would carry on doing physics,’ he explained.

  Dare did continue on. Not long after Cox left, they played Manchester Rockworld and he came to see them play. ‘They’re still going now,’ says Taylor. ‘Dare is really Darren Wharton and there have been various line-up changes, but Brian was there for the first two CDs.’ Vinny Burns went on to join Asia and Ultravox and then became big in Japan as a member of Ten. The Maple Squash Club was torn down years ago and flats built in its place. NL Distribution re-released Out of the Silence in 2008, probably to capitalise on Cox’s newfound fame. ‘I’ve got four albums on my phone and I regularly listen to them,’ says fan Tony Steel.

  Taylor lost contact with Cox after he quit Dare. However, a random trip out with Darren Wharton after the band had split led to a mini reunion. ‘I did actually see Brian in the pub once,’ says Taylor. ‘Brian was asking Darren how he did his different tones of voice – you know, when you harmonise in a studio? He wanted to know about octaves and things like that and how to do them. So he was obviously doing a bit of singing with D:Ream or something in the studio with them. That’s the only time I’ve seen Brian after he left Dare.’

  Cox’s hair metal days were over. Despite being his entrance into the music business and a fundamental era in moving from young adult to grown-up, Dare are only ever mentioned as an afterthought in interviews with the scientist. Instead, he’s known as the rock star physicist who played keyboards with D:Ream – ironic considering his position in Dare was far more substantive than in the late-Nineties dance act, as we’ll explore. In fact, when asked about his time in pop, Cox himself set the record straight. ‘My memory of music is not D:Ream,’ he said. ‘It’s more this band Dare I was in.’ The Maple Squash Club regulars will be glad to hear him say that. Despite leaving the band the long hair remained (and would so for a number of years), but it was time to head back to academia.

  CHAPTER 4

  UNIVERSITY IS A D:REAM

  It’s funny that in almost every profile ever written about him, Brian Cox has become known as an ex-D:Ream band member. That’s not to say it’s not true; it is. But compared to the five years he slogged away in Dare, his brief sojourn into the actual fold of D:Ream between 1993 and 1994 was merely a blip. In fact, he spent just as much time with them as their sound engineer, though as a dance act that required less effort than it might have done for the Dare roadies. ‘It was just when [singer] Peter Cunnah was essentially on his own,’ he remembers. ‘It was just driving him around the country in my car with a DAT (Digital Audio Tape) player. We’d drive to some club in Middlesborough, or somewhere and then he’d get his mic and sing, and I’d play the DAT player.’ For this, he would receive £20 a night.

  Dare fan club chief Mick Taylor recalls hearing on the grapevine that Cox had begun road managing a new band. This wasn’t strictly true. Back from Berlin, he felt right about leaving the band and heading back to academia. His time with Dare had been exciting and different, but the studious boy who once wired up his grandpa’s shed was still hiding away behind the long hair and ripped jeans. Having crawled to the end of his A-levels while juggling the group, he returned to full-time education and set about rectifying that D in Maths, picking up a text book and starting to re-learn properly what he had done rather haphazardly fiv
e years previously. He decided to apply, like everyone else but a little bit older, to university. ‘I knew I wanted to do physics,’ he said.

  Back home with his parents in Oldham, he applied to several of the top red-brick universities, including Liverpool, Edinburgh and Durham. The University of Manchester was obviously on the list. Not only was it considered one of the best universities in the country but it had a fantastic science department, especially physics. The faculty was large, it had thriving research and Jodrell Bank Observatory was affiliated to it and nearby. It also had connections with several of the foreign institutions that Cox would subsequently participate in, including the HERA collider in Hamburg (a large particle accelerator much like he would subsequently work on at CERN) and Tevatron in Chicago. He thought maybe he should move away from his hometown, spread his wings a little and see what life was like outside the Northwest, but Manchester and its staff impressed him. ‘When I came to Manchester, I think it was a combination of the history of the place and Jodrell Bank was a huge draw for me because I started doing astrophysics, actually,’ he said. ‘And to be at the university that owned one of the most famous radio telescopes in the world was a big thing for me. Also, the staff I met and research that was going on at the time, back in the mid-Nineties, just really captured my imagination. So, almost against my instinct to move out of my hometown, I came to [Manchester] and I’ve stayed here ever since.’

  He was accepted into the university – perhaps unsurprising for a local private school boy – and then had to wait for the next academic year. ‘It was a bit of a change, but it just felt right,’ he said. Meanwhile, money was tight and an opportunity came along. ‘I needed a summer job to bridge me over until I went to university,’ he recalls. ‘A mate of mine had just been sound engineering for [D:Ream] and said that they were shit and he didn’t want to do it anymore. So I said I’d do it because I needed a bit of cash.’ That was when he met Peter Cunnah. Like Cox, Northern Ireland native Cunnah had started out in a rock band. In 1990, trying to follow in the footsteps of bands like Happy Mondays and Ride, he had decided to move to London, where he arrived with £100 in his pocket and slept on the floor of a friend. He joined another band called Baby June, although it didn’t feel like they were going anywhere. But something had happened in London and that was the House scene. Cunnah was hooked, going out to clubs as often as he could and listening to a different kind of music. Two of his favourite hangouts were Love Ranch and The Brain, where a young DJ called Al Mackenzie plied his trade.

  Disliking the material that Baby June were producing, Cunnah asked Mackenzie to remix it and after a session in the studio came out with three versions of songs, which convinced them both that they needed to form a band together. Thus, D:Ream was born. A record deal was still elusive, though and so Cunnah made do with the PA gigs for which he had hired Cox. However, as Cox seems to have an uncanny ability to do, he had picked a winner – or at least a band with some legs. Cunnah and Mackenzie’s music began to gain traction and they scored a record deal. The first song ‘U R The Best Thing’ went out through a small management and record company called FXU and was released in July 1992. It reached No. 72 in the charts and was eerily similar to the Dare experience – young band, good songs, company behind them, few sales.

  In the October, Cox arrived at the University Of Manchester. It was everything he had hoped for. ‘I think it takes a little bit of time to work out how precious and how valuable your time at university really is,’ he reflected, some 20 years later. ‘Being an undergraduate is the time you learn most. For me certainly, I felt my brain was waking up. I was going to say waking up again, but actually waking for the first time, almost. Because the amount of information that’s fed to you and the way it’s fed to you, it’s a really unique experience. For me it was more valuable, because I knew that was going to be the case because I’d chosen to come back to it. For me, what I enjoyed about studying physics at Manchester was the breadth of research that was going on in the physics department. I can’t overstate the importance of that.

  ‘If you’re going to be taught about lasers, or you’re going to be taught about astrophysics, particle physics, quantum mechanics, the best way to be taught is to be taught by active researchers in the field. And this is a huge advantage Manchester physics has – of being so big that we have experts across pretty much every field of physics that you’re going to study.’ He delved into the legendary textbooks, relishing the deep thinking required. ‘There are two famous physics textbooks,’ he said. ‘One of them is Goldstein, it’s called Classical Mechanics and the other one’s [by] Jackson and is called Classical Electrodynamics – anybody who’s done a physics degree will know them. Jackson’s book is bigger. You could just sit there for years and not understand everything. And probably decades and not do all the problems in it.’

  1993 was when D:Ream finally got it right. They were taken on by Magnet Records, an ageing label which had recently been bought and revitalised by Warner Brothers. ‘U R The Best Thing’ had been anointed DJ Pete Tong’s Essential Tune of 1992, but that hadn’t seemed to help. Amazingly, when ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ – the song that would later catapult them to the top of the charts – was released at the end of January 1993, it only got to No. 24. But in April that year, they re-released ‘U R The Best Thing’ and it sneaked into the Top 20. The band were asked to appear on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. Cunnah decided they should address their stage act. ‘Doesn’t it really piss you off when it’s a brilliant record but all you get is someone plonking away on a keyboard with a couple of Muppet dancers flanking the stage?’ he told the NME at the time. They needed a stage full of personnel and their sound engineer-cum-friend Brian Cox fit the bill.

  Almost by accident, the university physics student was in a band again. ‘They needed a keyboard player to do a television show,’ said Cox. ‘I just stood there and waved my hair around.’ And what mighty hair it was! With locks almost down to his waist (no mullet this time) and wearing what can only be described as a skinny sleeveless tartan-esque suit – over a bare chest, no less – Cox found himself on the most legendary pop show in British history. ‘It was brilliant,’ he recalled to BBC Radio 4. ‘I’d never done it with Dare. We did one with the Bee Gees and one with Robert Plant, so that was iconic. It’s like The Sky at Night actually, this thing that I’d grown up with that I could be a part of.’

  It was the first of five appearances on the Top of the Pops show. The Bee Gees episode was particularly thrilling. Speaking to the Sunday Mirror, he said: ‘I really wanted their autographs but didn’t have any paper. The only thing I had was my physics exam syllabus, so I ripped a page out of that and got them all to sign it.’ Two more singles followed, though didn’t fare any better than No. 19 and then the band got two big breaks. One was a call from America to tell them ‘U R The Best Thing’ had gone to No. 1 in the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart on 17 July. They travelled to the States, where the record company put on a limo and they performed a few times in Los Angeles, but it was a call from the office of a certain Mancunian boy band that really put them on the map. At the time Take That were the UK’s biggest pop group and their tour was a guaranteed chance to target thousands of young people. D:Ream were tapped as the lads’ support act.

  ‘It was a bit of a shock because we were this hip, young dance act and they were… well, they were Take That,’ Cunnah told the Guardian. ‘Clubbers only buy singles and 12-inch singles. Working with Take That meant access to a much bigger market, one where girls waved banners saying they loved you.’ The group seized the opportunity to widen their fan base and ended up having a riotous time. ‘In Aberdeen, our dressing rooms were caravans that the fans had to go past,’ recalled Cunnah. ‘Jason [Orange] and Gary [Barlow] thought it would be a good idea to clamber on top of our caravan, so they did and 200 fans ran up to it, screaming and just rocked our caravan. It was like a roar of thunder – frightening!’ Cox and his band mates were beginning to revel in the spotli
ght, too. While in Aberdeen staying at the Thistle Hotel, they had to be asked by a member of staff to stop annoying their fellow guests by playing the piano and singing in the bar at three in the morning.

  For Cox, this was a bizarre time. ‘It was mental,’ he said. ‘I was a student, so I would be in the lab doing experiments or in lectures during the day. Then I’d take off my lab coat, get on the bus and be playing live in front of 50,000 in Manchester’s G-Mex stadium in the evening.’ The students he spent time with in the lab loved the fact they had a pop star in their midst, but he had to endure a lot of teasing from the other side. Unlike with his Dare band mates, who had never really known about his academic proclivities, he had to keep travelling back and forth to Manchester to ensure he kept up with his studies. ‘It wasn’t a bad job for a student but I didn’t make very much money out of it,’ he told the Sun. ‘I’d finish a physics lecture on a Friday night, then go over the road to the Manchester Evening News Arena to play a show supporting Take That. I didn’t find it that weird, but I think a lot of other students did.’

  With a girlfriend now in tow, he didn’t indulge in the groupies on offer, but enjoyed this time as did his parents, who supported his decision and again delighted in the fact their son was playing music. Cunnah was pleased with the new more pop and mainstream direction the band was taking. ‘That was wild,’ he said of the Take That tour. ‘We were playing to 10,000 kids a night, who weren’t pissed, weren’t on one, weren’t old enough to be biased about what they were listening to and who gave us a damn good chance. Have we sold out? Of course not! People just always find a hole to pick in something so I want this music to reach as many people as it can.’ Not everyone in the band agreed, though. At this point, founder member Al Mackenzie decided to leave. Several news reports suggested it was because he didn’t agree with the way the band were progressing, supporting boy bands, but Cunnah disagreed. ‘He just hated the publicity schedule we had to do,’ he said. ‘He’s a typical DJ – he wants to make music, not waste time being interviewed.’