Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi: ‘Can you spot which of us is the rock star?’

Steve Davis is waving a modular synthesiser at me. He’s 10 minutes early for our scheduled chat, and his music-and-book-writing compadre, Kavus Torabi, hasn’t logged on to Zoom but, so Davis is displaying me his favorite toy: a synthesiser with out a keyboard. There are lots of knobs and switches, and holes the place you slot in sound modules.

“It’s not lost on me that this is a bit of a blokey hobby,” he says cheerfully. “I was checking out online demos about how to use these synths and I ended up watching soldering. A bloke soldering modules. But there was nothing else to do, so I watched it for quite a bit.”

Ah, Steve “Interesting” Davis. Though I’m interviewing Davis, 63, as a result of of his second life in music (therefore the synth), he’s self-aware sufficient to play as much as his long-time fame. As the six-times world champion who dominated snooker in the Eighties, Davis was deemed much less flamboyant, extra robotic than his rivals. Spitting Image gave him the nickname “Interesting”, and he’s used it as his model ever since. The most up-to-date of his three autobiographies is referred to as Interesting, he wrote a three-volume recipe e-book in the Nineteen Nineties referred to as The Steve Davis Interesting Cookbook, and his radio present is referred to as – you guessed it – The Steve Davis Interesting Music Show. Davis being boring is like a joke tic. “Is Kavus coming on now?” he says. “That’s good. I’ve exhausted my chat.”

Davis sits again down on a black leather-based couch, and picks up a bowl of breakfast oats. There’s a window behind him, some data to the proper. The total vibe is a bit “the ex-wife took the furniture but a trip to Leatherland sorted me out”. In distinction, when Torabi comes on to the name, to the sound of his canine, Teddy, barking, his curly-haired head looms out of a starry universe background. Things aren’t a lot much less cosmic when he manages to get rid of it and reveals himself to be sitting in a book-and-CD-lined sitting room with partitions painted like a lilac sky.

“Can you spot which of us is the rock’n’roll star?” says Davis. Torabi is in a sage-green embroidered kurta, his curly hair wild. Davis is in T-shirt and black tracky bottoms, with a brief gray crop.

“Kavus wants me to grow my hair,” he says.

“Or a beard,” says Torabi. “A really long one, like David Letterman.”

“As a result of being around Kavus, I’m very aware that I’m no longer allowed to wear any type of blue jeans,” says Davis. “I’m wearing black chinos instead. As yet I’ve struggled to get into pointed boots. I find they’re uncomfortable on the ankle.”

We may spend all day taking the mick about the variations between Davis and Torabi. Davis is a suburban, straight-laced, undemonstrative, retired solo sportsman. Torabi is an emotional, psychedelic, improvisational, band-hopping, working guitarist. But their friendship is born of their Venn diagram overlap. They actually, actually join on music.

Not simply any music. Though Davis’s 1983 Desert Island Discs included such mainstream acts as Stevie Wonder. Since then, he’s moved additional and additional into the actually various. What he and Torabi love is experimental, non-linear, out-there sounds. Their first assembly was at a Magma gig, in Paris, in 2006 (Magma are an influential prog-jazz-opera “zeuhl” band led by classical drummer Christian Vander). Davis worships Magma a lot that he’d placed on a sequence of concert events for them in London a 12 months beforehand. In Paris, Torabi and his spouse, Dawn, began speaking to Davis, and afterwards Dawn stated: “He’s one of us, isn’t he?” From there, Davis and Torabi’s friendship grew, to embody the radio present, some spectacular DJing gigs, an precise band, the Utopia Strong (they’ve made 4 albums), and now, a e-book, Medical Grade Music.

Initially, they thought they’d write a e-book that beneficial 52 of their favorite music tracks. The thought was that the reader would spend per week listening to every piece, whereas studying Davis and Torabi’s evaluation. But lockdown modified that concept, and in reality, Medical Grade Music has change into extra like them: a wierd hybrid, an odd coupling. It accommodates two timelines and the reader hops between them. In one, Davis tells the story of his curiosity in music, the growth of his and Torabi’s friendship, and the approach they ended up working collectively. In the second, Torabi provides us his memoir as a musician, how he was born in a British-Iranian household the place music was not current in any respect, and how he got here to play with some of the most revered outre music combos there are, reminiscent of Gong, Cardiacs and his personal band, Knifeworld.

Torabi writes compellingly about the Nineteen Nineties, at one level describing how he had an epiphany at the notorious Spiral Tribe Castlemorton rave, although he’d arrived pondering it could be a crusty/area rock competition. He provides that entire Britpop decade a totally completely different musical spin: “Well, the story that we’re used to hearing about the 90s is the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, Oasis. But 90s London to me was this completely different story that was running alongside, and it was just as exciting. Under the radar.” He additionally, I’ve to say, writes brilliantly about taking acid. “I had to write the positive acid story, because it was really, really good for me, at least.”

“Kavus has got his whole history in this music, it’s really interesting,” says Davis. “I liked Kavus’s bits of the book. I hated reading my bits for the audiobook. Things that you think are going to be really funny, when you read them out, you realise that maybe they weren’t. Or they are funny, but you’re not a natural orator.”

It should be odd to be deemed hilarious, when the joke is you being boring.

“Well, you’re aware of your image, but you don’t consider that it’s really you,” he says. “People who think that are people who’ve never met you. But also, no smoke without fire. If you get a boring image, there may be a reason why you’ve got that.”

That picture has led to years of Davis being handled like a novelty, and there’s an incident in the e-book that demonstrates this. After years of a weekly radio present on the delightfully Partridge-sounding Phoenix FM in Brentwood and Billericay, Davis and Torabi have been requested to DJ at the last-ever Bloc Weekend competition in 2016. Davis genially hosted a pool match for the artists and DJs, acquired drunk and loved himself. When it got here to DJing, he was very nervous, and when he lastly dared to lookup at the crowd, he was confronted with a sea of himself. The organisers had handed out Steve Davis masks, as a joke.

You may think about a state of affairs of Davis being upset by this, however his good humour and enjoyment of music meant that he wasn’t. He liked DJing, and for his or her subsequent gig, at Glastonbury’s Park stage, he and Torabi had some tote baggage made up with “Last Night Kavus Torabi Saved My Life” and “Last Night Steve Davis Bored Me Shitless” and threw them out to the crowd.

Davis’s lack of ego helped when, in 2019, he and Torabi, with Coil’s Mike York, determined to kind the Utopia Strong. Torabi and York are very skilled musicians; Davis has by no means realized an instrument. The purpose he selected an analogue modular synth is that it doesn’t have a keyboard. The first time all of them jammed collectively, he says, he felt like “the guy in The Inbetweeners who gets on the motorbike and then smashes into the wall”. But he was conscious of “when the stuff I was doing wasn’t sounding right. So I just turned it down.”

By doing this, says Torabi, Davis confirmed extra acumen than most musicians, irrespective of how completed. “It’s about taste, isn’t it?” he says. “Steve has really good musical taste. And jamming together is about people agreeing with one another. It’s like a conversation: “‘For the next three hours, we’re just going to compliment each other and agree with one another, and when somebody makes a point, rather than take the alternative route, I’m going to do something that backs up that point.’”

Their conversational jams turned rapidly into an album, which Davis was completely ecstatic about, particularly when it was launched on the extremely revered Rocket label. Since then, they’ve made three extra. And then there have been the gigs. They each simply love the gigs. Bravely, they’re utterly improvised, which is new, even for Torabi: “I’ve never been in a situation before where, when we walk on stage, we don’t know what we are going to do other than saying, ‘Let’s do this in E minor.’”

Davis likens taking part in in Utopia Strong gigs to taking part in a snooker sport. “Improvising music is more like sports than actual rehearsed music, because you’re in the moment,” he says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, so you’re really on the seat of your pants. I have absolutely no knowledge of playing a rehearsed piece of music, I don’t know what that would be like. I may not be good at that. But fortunately I’m not ever going to experience it, because I don’t think we’re ever going to go down the road of playing our bangers to people five years down the line.”

All in all, they’re each utterly delighted with their new enterprise, and solely pissed off that their gigging was reduce brief because of lockdown. No doubt they’ll get again to it as quickly as they’ll. Middle-aged man friendship is a stunning factor, and Davis and Torabi experience it. They each got here into one another’s lives after a big male affect went away. For Torabi, it was Tim Smith, chief of the Cardiacs, who died in July 2020, after being semi-paralysed for a few years. “Tim’s one of the most, if not the most, pivotal figure in my life,” he says. “And with what happened to him 12 years ago, I lost him. I lost what we had.”

For Davis, it was his dad. “My father and myself, we were a team from me being 14, 15,” he says. “And even though I was going down the ranking list as a snooker player, we were still going through the same process of practising, he was my coach. I was playing for him towards the end, for his enjoyment, even though I wasn’t necessarily enjoying it myself. The moment he passed away, it was like, ‘I can retire’.”