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The media-savvy British physicist talks about his music career, his TV work and why the UK government should bet big on science.

How did you get involved in rock music?

When I was 18, I joined the band Dare. We recorded two albums and toured with the likes of Jimmy Page before we broke up in 1991. Our finale was like something out of This is Spinal Tap – we had a fight in a bar in Berlin. Then I studied physics at the University of Manchester and worked as a sound engineer for the band D:Ream before I joined the group in 1993. We had several hits, including a number one, Things Can Only Get Better, which the Labour party later used in its 1997 UK election campaign.

Do your peers resent you gadding about to make TV programmes?

It’s now widely accepted that science needs a greater visibility and that it needs to become part of popular culture. My colleagues also appreciate that I put my head above the parapet to make the case for science funding.

You have openly criticised the British government over the cash crisis facing the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which funds the UK’s astronomy and physics facilities. How do you feel about the Labour government these days?

I have bought back into the Labour dream to some extent after seeing the prospect of cuts coming at us like an express train under the Tory party. Labour’s science minister, Paul Drayson, is probably the best we can have, though Labour has made a bloody mess of the STFC. Overall, Labour hasn’t done badly, though spending on research today is not much different from what it was under the Tories in 1985.

Why are you so worked up over funding cuts?

If you cut more than £500 million off the science budget, it would do little short-term good and the potential downside is immense. I can’t understand it. To me boosting science funding seems like a good bet in pure gambling terms.

Do you have any time to do science?

At the Large Hadron Collider I ran an upgrade project called FP420 for several years, which will hopefully result in additional particle detectors being installed very close to the LHC beams. I also study phenomenology: it’s the bridge between theory and experiment when we research the tiny building blocks of matter and the fundamental forces that operate between them. I work on the LHC’s Atlas detector and novel ways to find Higgs particles, which could help explain the origins of mass. And I’m currently writing a paper on using a process called vector boson fusion to hunt for and measure the properties of Higgs particles at the LHC. It’s wonderful, speculative, blue-skies science.

In the light of your latest TV project, which is your favourite wonder of the solar system?

Saturn’s foggy moon, Titan. We had thought it was our least wonderful satellite but now we realise it looks so much like Earth, but with methane instead of water: methane rain, snow, rivers and lakes. It became a magical character in the TV series.