Carlisle was placed again on the Rock ‘n’ Roll heritage map, after it was revealed that Professor Brian Cox OBE once threw a Teapot out of a Carlisle hotel window, whilst on tour with D:ream in the 90′s.
Interviewed on BBC2′s desert island discs, the former Keyboard playing Particle Physicist said “We were quite innocent. The worst thing that happened was I remember throwing a tea tray out of a hotel window in Carlisle. It just landed and the teapot smashed on the pedestrianised shopping area outside the window.”
He went on “It was after throwing the teapot out of the window that I had an epithony I realised that if a teapot had been flying in the opposite direction, and the two had smashed together we might have seen first hand evidence of the Higgs PG Tips particle. I then realised that my life would be better served unlocking the mysteries of particle physics, so I quit D:Ream and went back to college”.
Local News rag, the News & Star were quickly on the case working out which hotel it was – The Crown & Mitre. Due to a brilliant Holmes-like piece of deduction that the only hotel leading out on to a pedestrianised area could be the Crown & Mitre Hotel, on Scotch Street.
They went further and even found Roy, who had worked there in the 90′s. “Roy, who worked here at the time, knows who the band is but doesn’t remember anyone doing that,”.
Brilliant deducive journalism, well I have gone one better and picked up on the trail of the smashed teapot.
After writing this article, a D:Ream fan – Miriam Shite, emailed me with a picture (above) of the good looking keyboard/scientist maestro actually in the act of throwing the teapot. As Miriam explains “Myself and twenty other D#Ream fans had camped out all night to see a glimpse of Peter Cunnah (D#Ream frontman) and were chanting his name, but when Brian Cox came to the window and told us all to ‘shut the f**k up as he was trying to sleep’ we shouted to him to go and get Cunnah, he left the window but returned with a pot of scalding tea and said ‘here’s Peter, enjoy f**kers’ before throwing the tea out of the window and showering a poor innocent passing vagrant”.
I also managed to locate the ‘passing vagrant’ another witness to the days events, Filo the local tramp; who can remember being covered in hot tea on the very morning the Hadron Collider scientist perpurtrated his Rock ‘n’ Roll deed.
“I was passing under the Crown and Mitre hotel” Filo said “When a teapot and a large quantity of hot tea hit me in the face. It was a cold day so I was glad of being warmed up. I even kept the lid of the teapot to wear as a hat” Filo said.
“I have since became a huge fan of the warm vocal warblings of D:Ream frontman Peter Cunnah. I once found their second album World in a bin and kept it, but I don’t have a CD player to play it on. I have got D # R E A M tattooed on my knuckles, with the # in the fold of skin between the thumb and forefinger! Now, can I have that fiver you promised me for making all of this up….!”