196. Anathema

Space Rocks IndigO2

22 September 2019

There’s a strange, beautiful symmetry to it all. As I write this, it is 2025, and my daughter, once the kid who built Lego spaceships on the living room floor, is now at university, studying astrophysics. Not just studying it but thriving in it and she talks about gravitational waves the way other people talk about the weather. She’s light years ahead and I couldn’t be prouder.

Looking back, I can trace one of the sparks, that first moment the stars stopped being just pretty lights and became possibilities, to a single day: Space Rocks. It was the brainchild of Alexander Milas and the European Space Agency: part science festival, part rock show, part love letter to the universe. A day of astronauts, physicists, dreamers, and music. My daughter was thirteen at the time, wide-eyed and curious, more interested in the “why” of things than the “what.” My son, then ten years old, was initially benign to the whole thing; but similarly, soon became engaged in being in the same room as an actual astronaut.

That afternoon, we sat in the audience whilst said astronaut, Tim Peake, talked about his time on the International Space Station, about sunrise sixteen times a day, about floating in silence while the world spun beneath him. I remember glancing at my daughter and seeing her listen. Not politely, not dutifully, but deeply. Something clicked in her expression; the quiet, focused kind of awe that every parent recognises as the start of something big; something in her heart took root.

The evening show, one of my best pals and I attended, it was Liverpool’s Anathema, who took the stage for a special performance called The Space Between Us; a collaboration with the European Space Agency, complete with cosmic visuals and violinist Anna Phoebe.

They opened with Hans Zimmer’s “Day One”, a soundtrack made for wonder, as enormous visuals of galaxies, nebulae and star fields bloomed behind them.

Anathema’s music has always had this weightless, otherworldly grace, equal parts melancholy and transcendence, and that night, paired with images of the infinite, it became something altogether more profound. Tracks from The Optimist swelled and faded into Distant Satellites and Weather Systems each with videos of galactic grandeur backdropping the soaring music. They closed with a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Keep Talking”, the crowd holding up their phone lights like constellations.

I remember thinking then, and now, how beautiful it all was, this blending of science and art, discovery and emotion, wondering if events like this could really change someone’s path. Years later, I found myself standing with Professor Brian Cox, chatting for twenty minutes about science, education, and the small, accidental ways people find their calling. I mentioned my daughter and her path to astrophysics. He took great interest, given he has spent his whole life in the pursuit of inspiring young people to love science. He asked me what had put her on this journey; I mentioned Space Rocks, and how that one day seemed to light the fuse. He paused, smiled, and said quietly, “Alexander is fantastic. We need more of those.” I also sensed that something had triggered in his mind.

Perhaps it had done, because a year or so later, my daughter and I sat together at the Royal Opera House, this time at his Symphonic Horizons show, a breathtaking fusion of orchestral music, NASA and ESA visuals, and Cox himself musing on the nature of time, the mystery of black holes and the birth of stars. It felt like we’d come full circle, two dots on a cosmic thread, stitched together by music and curiosity.

Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe it’s wishful thinking. But I like to believe that something began that night, that the universe whispered softly in a little girl’s ear through an astronaut and some stunning visuals. Now, as she chases starlight for real, I can’t help but think that’s what discovery and curiosity, maybe life, is about. Finding a spark, and following it, wherever it leads.