English dance music stalwarts, Orbital, have today shocked the music and science industries by announcing that band member, Paul Hartnoll, is in fact the brains behind world famous physicist, Stephen Hawking’s, theoretical work on black holes.
Hartnoll, a former child prodigy, first met Hawking in 1977 when he was just nine years old, “I first met Stephen when he was speaking as a guest in a space camp I went to in Surrey, as a kid. I was crazy about all that sci-fi stuff!”
“I spoke to him after his speech and he was really impressed with some of the ideas I had on gravitational singularities,” continued Paul. “That’s when we decided that he would present my ideas to the board of trustees in Oxford claiming that they were Stephen’s ideas because no one would to listen to a nine year old boy from Kent when it comes to the geometric theory of gravitation,” admitted Mr. Hartnoll.
“To be honest I don’t even think he really understood it himself,” said Paul, “but there’s something very genuine and believable about that computer voice of his and the trustees decided to fund the research. We were over the moon, or at least as far above it as the Earth’s gravitational pull would allow,” he geekishly joked.
“The research was an unbelievable success. Stephen was way out of his depth but all I had to do was program speeches and lectures into his computer so Stephen could just roll up and accept all the plaudits,” continued Paul enthusiastically. “Even Stephen can work a robotic wheelchair so it was a brilliant set up.”
“By the late 80’s we were really living the life. We had everything, girls, drugs, money, you name it – we had it. We were regulars in all of London’s top clubs. Stephen was really into all that 80’s synth pop, he’d be out on the dance floor doing the robot for hours on end,” he claimed. “It was around this time that he asked me to return the favour that he had done for me all those years ago.”
“He had been working on this really groundbreaking musical project for a couple of years, but much like nobody would listen to a nine year old boy about general relativity, nobody would listen to a middle aged man with motor neuron disease when it comes to game-changing electronic music,” he divulged.
“So, me and my brother Phil stepped up and approached a couple of record labels with Stephen’s work. Needless to say they loved it and Orbital was born. We’ve been touring and releasing music for Stephen ever since,” recounted Paul. “Apart from between 2004 and 2009 when Stephen briefly sold out and got some Dutch former male lap dancer called Sander Van Doorn to release a few really cheesy trance tracks for him but people soon got bored of that and Stephen decided to go back to his roots,” he explained ruefully.
“We always knew that one day we would have to come clean about our past, the first step to this admission was when we performed together at the Olympics. We thought that if people were already associating us with each other it would be much easier for them to accept the truth. Stephen is seventy one years old now so we thought the time was right to fully confess. Hopefully now people can appreciate us both for what we really are, a physicist who happens to be really good at music, and a musician who is brilliant at physics. Like Brian Cox except there’s two of us.”
