Charlie Marshall, steel- string theorist
CHARLIE MARSHALL IS A successful musician who became a science educator – and now combines both passions. “I spend a lot of time pondering atoms,” he says.
Melbourne’s Marshall, 52, is well-known to Australian alternative music fans. Through the 1980s and 1990s he fronted bands such as Harem Scarem that served as training grounds for musicians who went on to later fame in outfits such as the Bad Seeds, Dirty Three, Avalanches, and Hunters and Collectors.
Come the turn of the century, however, Marshall’s music stopped. He gave away the rock game to take a science degree and transform into a science teacher.
However, after a few years in his new role something odd happened.
“If you’re passionate about things – for me, music and science, especially physics – eventually things start to happen subconsciously,” Marshall says. “Suddenly all these songs just sort of materialised in my head.”
The result is that rarest of things: an album full of science-themed melodic rock.
Called Sublime, it is a collection of songs exploring nucleosynthesis, electromagnetism, radioactivity, and cosmology, while name-checking Einstein, Newton, Dawkins, Feynman, and Attenborough.
Remarkably, Attenborough returned the favour, sending the muso a handwritten letter to thank him for the inclusion.
“At the moment I’m working on a new song about gravity waves,” Marshall says. “That’s proving quite difficult. But quantum mechanics is the ultimate challenge, I think, when it comes to writing a pop song.”