Thank you to everyone who has come to Emergence in this first week of the UK Tour. I’m really enjoying messing around in front of the big tele :-) Next show is Sheffield on Thursday ….

Production rehearsals today in Sheffield - the first time we’d built the screen. It’s quite big. Tour starts in Edinburgh on Wednesday, then on to Manchester and Leeds at the weekend.

Me explaining local gauge invariance, which is probably one of the more ambitious bits of the Arena shows to be honest :-)

In February I spent an unforgettable week at Miraval Studios in France with @PJHarveyUK and Dario Marianelli recording music for my Emergence live shows. We made a little film youtu.be/lI7a4j-Uf3I?is=90n9…

Here is my view on what’s wrong with funding of scientific research in the UK, and how I would change the focus if it was up to me! There is a long list of things that UKRI needs to weigh when making decisions about funding for research and facilities, and driving growth is not one of them. The reason is that the whole of UKRI’s portfolio is essential for driving growth - indeed the research ecosystem is one of the necessary foundations of growth. The point I made at the Labour Conference is quite simple. UKRI’s budget is 0.65% of government expenditure, at a little under £10 Bn per year. That is a very tiny leaver when seen through the prism of attempting to use it to make a step change in economic growth - especially when the leaders of UKRI and the Research Councils are not economists and should not be economists! Their expertise lies in research. BUT, and this is the key point - if by fiddling around trying to use this tiny budget (in relative terms) to make a noticeable change in growth you damage the fundamentals, then you run the real risk of damaging the growth potential of the rest of the economy. Universities, research labs, education and inspiration are all essential for growth. This is what UKRI should be focused on because they are the custodians of this VERY valuable but fragile world-leading ecosystem. So, I would say to UKRI, do the thing you are supposed to do, do it well on behalf of the rest of the economy, and do nothing else.

I start the UK and Ireland leg of my Emergence tour next week - here’s a clip of a film we made about the music, recorded at Miraval Studios earlier this year. The full film is on YouTube somewhere or other .. :-)

This is an accurate summary of my position :-)

Looking forward to Bucharest this evening - this is what our show looks like at 10am …. They do build things fast :-)