Steve Davis is genuinely nice chap. Someone who is a sporting legend and perhaps the greatest player to ever play the game. Aside from that he’s someone who has dived head first into the world of electronic music with an enthusiasm that is contagious. He literally loves it. He loves the edges of it. The stuff made on the fringes… But as you can read he has also learnt to embrace the mainstream. As part of The Utopia Strong, alongside Kavus Torabi and Mike York, he is in a band creating smashed out soundscapes with psychedelic washes and waves. As someone who has been so hugely successful in the sporting world his is an interesting lens to see the world of music and electronic sound through. There will never be another interview that pulls together space rock, snooker, Magma and modular synths. Onwards…

Test Pressing
Hello? Hi.

Steve Davis
Oh, your background is much nicer than mine. This is about positive thinking and stuff? Is that what it was or is it something else?

Test Pressing
No, I met you with Matthew from ALM (modular synth company - Ed). Do you remember?

Steve Davis
Oh, I hope I haven’t double booked.

Test Pressing
Uh, positive thinking sounds good though. Maybe we could have a threeway conversation on music and positive thinking. Yeah, no, we’re here to talk about music. Do you wanna crack on then?

Steve Davis
Um, well, well I planned for positive thinking… It’s a big industry now… Once upon a time I would've been considered to be prime, prime meat for a positive thinker to get their teeth into though now I can't see what the fuss is about because my motivation has completely moved away from that. I'm much more psychedelic now.

Test Pressing
Well, I suppose it's a different time now in comparison to when you came through as they didn't really have that sort of science in sport. I mean, it was like, you just kind of got on with it. Footballers would be smoking and drinking etc…

Steve Davis
Depression wasn't a thing... You know... Different times.

Test Pressing
Where are you Steve?

Steve Davis
I'm in Romford.

Test Pressing
Does everyone know you around there when you go out on the street?

Steve Davis
There was a time when I was 18 and half a million people watched snooker so nearly everybody in the country could recognise you, but nowadays it's a slightly different thing. I can walk through a load of kids now, you know, a bunch of school kids, and I could get through successfully without being recognised. When I went into the jungle a few years back for a week or two, after coming out of there, lots of school kids recognised me. That was quite weird.

Test Pressing
Did you do that ITV thing?

Steve Davis
Yeah, it was great. It was a right laugh. It's like it’s a holiday centre without food.

Test Pressing
Who was on your one?

Steve Davis
In the musical world Kian Egan from Westlife. Lovely guy. Also, Matthew Wright who likes Gong and stuff and he's pretty out there even though he's got a normal job. He loves space rock.

Test Pressing
How did you get talking about cosmic music with him?

Steve Davis
Well we were singing Gong songs in the jungle, but they never played them ‘cause they have to pay the copyright. So they can't do it. So the music you hear anybody singing, they have to pay PRS on it or whatever.

Test Pressing
Well, there you go… Well, let's ask you some questions. So where, uh, where did your love of music first come from. Bit of a basic one…

Steve Davis
Um, it didn't come from anywhere I could sort of pinpoint… I mean, it didn't come from my parents. I think just as every teenage kid gets into a bit of music when they get to a certain age. The road I travelled down I wasn't particularly worried about popular music. I was much more interested in different genres at that time. And of course, space rock was the genre of the 70s, especially the early seventies. And so I was in the right place for that to become big in my life. Most people knew of Yes and Genesis. I realised I was seeking out different types of bands and some of the German musicians that were popular back then, like Faust and Harmonia, and at that point I realised that I wasn’t really prepared to put up with what was fed to me.

So I tried to seek out music that was a bit different and that's been something that’s stayed with me. I like relatively complex music to get my teeth into. I was always looking for something a bit different and it led me to eventually seek out a lot of electronic artists that I missed first time round because in the 90s I was into a lot of soul music. I went down a soul rabbit hole.

Test Pressing
Yeah. That's what I thought you were into initially was like soul. That's what I had you down with…

Steve Davis
That sort of happened along with a lot of the pirate radio stations in the London area. Robbie Vincent's show was on the radio and he was playing a mixture of jazz and soul. I got caught up in the whole seven inch single collecting world of soul music and seeking out the one hit or the no hit wonders. And in the same way the same thing happened. I wasn't necessarily listening to Teddy Pendergrass albums as much as I was listening to these people that were very obscure. So that's a sort of half a problem in that I’m always looking for obscure stuff only but fortunately I met Kavus Torabi, my friend and bandmate, and he's a musician with a much broader palette of music appreciation. He exorcised all of my anti-snobbery on listening to popular music. So fortunately I’m now free of that. I can listen to anything with an open mind, but it's taken a long time.

Test Pressing
I guess when you start off with that sort of framework of sort of psychedelic electronics like Gong or whatever that that kind of sets you on your path if you know what I mean? Like we were into electro when we were 11 and you know you're really lucky if you hit a sort of a sort of river or a scene of music that just sets you up for the next however many years… It's like 'right here you go. This is the good stuff. Off you go….'

Steve Davis
But the thing about that would be that whilst that was happening, there were other types of music that were being made that were oblivious to you because you were in that zone. So you are living in that world, and that's sort of great, but you do have to sort of get rid of other stuff out of your life cause you haven't got time for it as you are so into that thing. So the playing catch up, listening to music genres that you totally ignored beforehand, is quite daunting.

Test Pressing
Well, I think you just have to accept that you're never gonna hear it all. There's always going to be labels and things that came out that you are like, ‘wow, I've never seen that in my life’.

Steve Davis
It's awful isn't it? I mean… It's been there… Your favourite band, you don't even know exists. How amazing is that they live in China. They live in China at the moment, your favourite band but you don’t know it exists. They've been around… They've got 10 albums out and you don’t know any of them…

Test Pressing
Well, it's a blessing and a curse because in many ways there's always stuff to discover. But then on the other hand you sort of feel like you're missing something. So your snooker career was really hitting its stride in the 80s (understatement of the year award there - Ed). Would you listen to music when you were practicing or was that just not done?

Steve Davis
No funny enough I don't think the two mix very well. I started to become a really good amateur and had the mentality of a professional. I didn't know I was gonna be a professional but I'd say from that time onwards, around the time maybe that punk came in, my musical interest sort of waned completely. It was just snooker. I'd listen to music, but I really wasn't so hooked up in it all. And then as the 80s unfolded, and my life became a little bit more set in stone in the summer months, and as snooker was a winter sport, there wasn't much happening. Even though I didn't go festivals during that time, I started listening to a lot of soul music.

Robbie Vincent was probably really instrumental in me getting more into that. And so for most of the 90s I started to be a big soul collector. Back end of the 80s and into the 90s. So during my snooker career I was able to separate the two hobbies… The collecting part of it and the listening part of it was done after playing snooker. But I never used music as a way of entertaining myself when I was practicing. I didn't really want to mix the two up and I'd never listen to any type of music before a match to relax or anything like that. It didn't seem like they were the two things that actually had any affinity with one another.

One's very much a doing thing and an activity where you are immersing yourself in a game where you’re trying to achieve ultimate control and your brain is fully trying to achieve that. Music is something totally different so for me they don't mix really.

Test Pressing
Someone mentioned to me a story where you’d been to Brazil or somewhere over that way to take part in a competition but you'd be buying records and bringing them back and selling them to collectors in the UK… Is that true?

Steve Davis
Well, sort of correct. I wasn't selling them to collectors. I can’t remember the places we went as it was a while ago but back then I was still into jazz and jazz funk and stuff. I was listening to the Robbie Vincent show and getting more and more down the soul rabbit hole and then I also liked Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s early stuff and lots of Flora Purim and Airto and a lot of the Brazilian stuff. So getting the chance to go to Brazil, I went to find a few record shops and bought some pretty decent local label stuff and loved them so bought a few copies and sent them to Robbie Vincent as a sort of thank you and he played it on the radio. I was like 'great, my work here is done' you know? I sort of bought like 10 copies of each of the ones I thought were good and got rid of them to people but I wasn't looking to turn a profit from it… It was a collectors thing.

Test Pressing
With Herbie Hancock… When you listen to something like ‘Sextant’ it still sounds like it was made tomorrow. When I met you I was with the aforementioned Matthew from Busy Circuits. Me and him sort of bonded over Black Dog and early British techno from the 90s. You got quite into it as well didn't you? By the way - your DJ name - Thundermuscle… That’s pretty strong. Where did you get that?

Steve Davis
Well, it's not really my DJ name… I went to the Hard Wax record shop in Berlin. I went there because I just started to get into techno and I thought this is great. So I was over there and I'm looking through the racks and I don’t see any names I know so the guy in the store realised I was floundering. And he said ‘can I help you with anything?’ He basically pulled out five albums and the first album he pulled out, and this is not exactly the same scene as what you're talking about but it's a great record, was by Surgeon. The album was called ‘Breaking the Frame’ and it was the first one I listened to when I got back and I thought, ‘bloody hell, this is brilliant’. It's quite a psychedelic album in itself. As a result of that, when we started DJing, we DJ'd at the Bloc weekend and Surgeon was on the bill. We had a good chat. And I was sort of saying, I love you, blah, blah, blah.

Once it became known that I was a DJ on Twitter somebody said, have you got a DJ name? And Surgeon got involved in the conversation and said, ‘what about DJ Thundermuscle?’ The word thundermuscle comes from a cameo part I played in a comedy series called ‘The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret’, where there was a drink called thunder. That was a health drink that North Korea were trying to get to the country and get rid of their plutonium and it sent everybody mad when they drunk it. So overnight I was given the name by a legend of the techno scene and how could I say no… So I had to live with it for a while even though it was embarrassing. I've gone back to Steve Davis now as a DJ name.

Test Pressing
Yeah. I was just like ‘wow’. That's a big name…

Steve Davis
Don't go there. Don't go there.

Test Pressing
Tell me about the modular synth interest. When did you first see modular systems?

Steve Davis
I was seeking out more electronic artists to go and see and saw a band that were using a modular set up. I'd never seen a module before. It was in 2015. And I was quite sort of taken with the fact that there was no keyboard and the music coming out of it sounded wonderful. And I thought maybe I could do that. So I bought a system eventually and then stared at it for quite a long time, not knowing what on earth it was doing. I was pretty scared of it. Eventually I sought out some help and a couple of lessons, so to speak, and got off and running. If anybody had told me that the end product would be like, you know, an album, three private press albums, and touring and playing live on stage. I mean how on earth could you say that's gonna happen in the space of seven years but it has done. To play it well is difficult. It's a challenge. But thankfully it doesn't require the 10,000 hours worth of practice as I've used all that up with snooker.

Test Pressing
Well, I think the point with modular since, especially with the live thing, is that it's quite hard to arrange. It's easy to get going and to keep it going, but then to give it a structure is hard. By the nature of them they can also be atonal but you work with musicians so I guess that opens that out.

Steve Davis
Yeah, it's tough to do separate different songs. Certainly that's difficult. You’ve got to be at a great level to sort of change key and keep everything going in that department. And also if you were gonna patch it from scratch live it would take a while. What I've worked out is that if you are doing an hour live performance, once you sort of drone the first part, you more or less are then into the next part. We do roughly 20 minute pieces on stage and then change key and do something else in another. And a lot of drone-based stuff. Once the first piece is out of the way, then it feels much more like it's totally improvised where I'm changing my sequences and we all see where it takes us. And then if it doesn’t work then I turn it off and do something else.

Our first album as The Utopia Strong with Kavus and Mike was made after a jam together with no other plan than to enjoy ourselves. And then we listened back that night and thought, ‘wow, we could make this into an album. We could take specific bits’. Once we got going once the first 20 minutes of patching was out the way and we hit a little groove, those pieces became the foundation of the album. We found a label, Rocket Recordings, who liked it and they said ‘we assume you are gonna tour aren't you?’ And then it obviously dawned on me that what that entailed was actually going and playing live on stage, which was totally daunting regardless of what I'd done in my previous life. I knew what I was doing with a snooker cue in my hand. I didn't exactly know what I was doing with a modular synth in front of me. And so we then had to go, well, how are we gonna approach playing live? And we said, well, just improvise.

So every night's different and that's fascinating. It's brilliant to do. Then we record lots of the nights and have put stuff out on private release when we think they are good enough. So that's what we've be been doing alongside putting out studio albums. The next one is out in June. The private press ones are more long form with mistakes in and stuff but I kind of like that.

Test Pressing
But I think it's the mistakes that make things, they often become your favourite bits if you know what I mean?

Steve Davis
Yeah. You're right.

Test Pressing
I dunno why, but I think it's because everything can now be perfect. I can sit on my computer here with Ableton or whatever, and I can draw in the most perfect delay, but if I get on like the delay unit over there and play with it in the mixing desk you're like, ‘oh, that's much better’.

Steve Davis
Our first private press album was really just a rehearsal that was recorded on to a Zoom recorder which picked up loads of like ambient stuff in the room and guitar pedals being pressed and you can hear clicks and everything in the room. It just adds to it all. And that’s a fascinating thing you realise and they become that. As you say they become parts that you really like.

Test Pressing
Um, when you were sort of at the peak of your career, was when acid house kicked off…

Steve Davis
I missed it. I missed the whole thing.

Test Pressing
No-one took you to a rave when you were famous and were like ‘you have to come check this out…’?

Steve Davis
No, I missed out. I missed out on the whole thing. Snooker players were drug tested. I couldn't have gone along to one of those on the off chance I'd have breathed in something or whatever. I didn't even know it existed. I’m an open book when it comes to music from that time.

Test Pressing
That's weird though. I would have imagined there were people on the fringes of snooker who knew musicians or whatever. Maybe it’s just social media now where you presume everyone moves in similar circles…

Steve Davis
I was a pretty good professional, you know, I wasn't caning it in any way, shape or form, let alone acid house parties. I wasn't really going to nightclubs a great deal. I would go to Ronnie Scotts. I’d spend time out there watching a lot of the jazz acts but I wasn't really into any scene as such. I went to a few soul weekenders and things like that but that was about it.

Test Pressing
It was interesting hearing you and Matthew ALM chat the other night, because you could see that snooker is still very much a huge passion to you.

Steve Davis
Yeah it's a part of my life that I don't need to really talk about too much more. I think the only reason we were talking about it was relating to the manufacturing logistics. You know… Is it worthwhile getting to the next level of production? It may not work, but that would apply whether you're a cue maker or a module maker.

Test Pressing
Yeah. It was craft versus sort of maximising basically. So last question. What's next for you?

Steve Davis
Next next thing for The Utopia Strong is the album released on the 10th of June and then a tour and the daunting prospect of us being the support band for Magma when they come over in June. I'm absolutely crapping myself as they are my musical heroes from as far back as in the seventies that actually we’re going to support. I don't even know how to think about it. Fortunately it's June, so it's a bit away. It will never come. That's too far in the future so I don't have to worry about it.

Test Pressing
The night I met you at Perimeter Jam (modular synth event - Ed) you did a killer modular set. Are you doing any more of those modular gigs?

Steve Davis
We are doing one in Birmingham on the 6th of July. It’s a tribute to Cabaret Voltaire which Gaz (YouTube tech reviewer and wizard - Ed) is involved with. I've embraced the modular world in as much as I'm gonna go to as many sort of modular meets as I can make because I really, I really like the people and I like the music that people make.

Test Pressing
That’s a perfect way to end as weirdly the chap I used to sit next to went to music college with Gaz and at my first job Karen in the office went out with Mal from Cabaret Voltaire for years. Full Circle.

Steve Davis
Wow. Amazing.

Test Pressing
Thanks for your time, Steve.

Steve Davis
It’s a pleasure. Cheers.

If you'd like to hear more music from The Utopia Strong as ever the best place to head is Bandcamp. Hit this LINK.