My life: Brian Cox

As far back as I can remember, I was interested in astronomy; always wanted a telescope and little star maps. I was interested in space flight in general, which I think can be traced back to my dad's interest. I was born just at the end of the Apollo programme, and we had pictures, I remember, on the walls, of Apollo, the landings on the moon. I always wanted to do something to do with space, even though I didn't know what the word was at the time.

When I got to senior school, aged 11, I was insistent that I didn't want to do anything other than physics and science. Then I got interested in music; but only from the perspective of wanting to be a pop star.

I taught myself to play keyboards at the age of 15 because I wanted to be in a band. And I joined a band (Dare) with a guy who used to be in Thin Lizzy, just because he lived near me. The first thing that happened to us was we got offered some shows in Hong Kong. So we came to Hong Kong and went to Kowloon and to a little club, and played there for two or three weeks. That was my first real trip outside Britain. We went back and got a record deal and so we made two albums, and toured with people like Jimmy Page and Gary Moore - so it was a rock band, basically - and then with a band called Europe; the Europe of (the song) The Final Countdown. We went on for about four years and the band split up and I went straight to university to do physics, which is what I had always planned to do.

I'm still into bands like Duran Duran. I've become friendly with the band quite recently, actually. I still like (David) Bowie, The Smiths and all the Manchester bands; New Order, Joy Division. But in other respects I've got into a wider range of music including some jazz and other stuff. So I've kind of gone backwards as well in time and broadened a little bit. I still think the 80s were the best. I'd do quite well on a quiz of 80s pop music.

It's great to see Hong Kong again - this is the only time I've been out of the airport since 1986. It's changed a lot. We stayed on Lantau, which was a tourist resort in 1986, so we got a little boat out and would stay there for a few days after we played the shows. And now it turns out there's an airport there!

I was working at Cern (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, at the Large Hadron Collider, as a PhD student, and the BBC were just getting interested in the LHC. I was interviewed as just one of the people working at Cern. They saw it, liked it and then they interviewed me again for a programme about Einstein, and then they interviewed me again and finally they said, "Do you want to make a couple of programmes?" So I made a couple of programmes and it went from there. I'd been on television before but in bands, so I'd been on shows like Top of The Pops (as keyboard player for pop band D:Ream), but nothing to do with science at all. I'm always asked about (being labelled the most-sexy scientist) and I never know what to say. I usually go with, "Yeah, but there isn't a great deal of competition."