Steve Davis Interview: Breaking The Frame

Photo: Steve Davis Credit: Amy Miveld

So the story’s out there: Steve Davis is a DJ. A few small gigs in London, then a gig at Bloc, and now a busy summer of festival bookings. But does anyone know what he actually plays? Does he mix? Does he get nervous? Does he get on it? Is he really into his music or is this just a bit of a novelty?

In amongst the pandemonium of “Steve Davis is a DJ don’t you know”, there’s been very little detail about what he’s actually doing creatively, so it was high time we found out.

To avid fans of snooker and soul music, this recent turn of events is actually not all that surprising. Steve has been an obsessive muso pretty much all of his life, it’s just the wider public didn’t know it. Even when world champion, he found time to accumulate literally rooms full of vinyl, he funded the production of a soul magazine, and he acted as a promoter/UK agent for one of his favourite acts. 

In more recent times he’s guested for Jarvis Cocker on 6Music and has built up a following as a radio host on his local station, Phoenix FM. Last year he even welcomed onto his show one of the biggest names in UK techno, Surgeon.

After ticking Glastonbury off the gig list and with Tramlines, Fantazia and Bluedot, we thought it'd be the perfect time to find out more about Steve. We join the conversation as he regales Mike with some of the trials and tribulations of putting on his own gigs in London.

Steve Davis: band promoter. A lot of people might be surprised about this. Tell us more!

It was a French band called Magma who I’d liked back in the 70s. When I realised they were still making records in the late 80s I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to see them in London again.” Once I had that little thought in my head, perhaps stupidly, I followed it through, having had no promoting experience whatsoever.

We did three dates at Bloomsbury Theatre and we sold out on each date, but I lost a fortune because of the bills and the overheads of just getting them to London. It was great fun losing it though!

I remember they had a rehearsal on the day of the first night, and all of a sudden the tour manager came up to me and said, “Steve - the piano’s shit”. They had a sort of house grand piano. “The piano player can’t play on it”. I thought, “what the fuck do I do now?!? How do I get hold of a grand piano?!?” 

So in desperation I phoned up Chappell’s of Bond Street - the main supplier for Yamaha in the UK - and amazingly they supplied the piano absolutely free of charge. They delivered it, tuned it and took it away three days later. That was just the nicest thing to help somebody out, someone who wasn’t in it for the money. 

All I was doing was giving people a chance to come and watch them again. And it was great because some people had clearly moved on in life but some hadn’t. So the first person who walked through the door still had his Afghan coat on from the 70s, and he was still living in a timewarp.

The next person who came through the door was a guy in a three-piece suit and a briefcase who’d obviously moved on but he was curious to know what the Magma that he used to know was like. There was such a cross section of people who turned up. It was marvellous.

It kind of sums up the music biz, you lost loads of money, but you had a good time, and you met some right characters.

Yeah, and for me doing the DJ stuff where we do Tramlines or whatever… it’s not like they said in the press that it’s a new career. It’s more about pursuing your hobby really and enjoying that. So I’ve retired from the game of snooker and it’s a nice thing to be able to have a bit more time to do things.

If someone says, “Can you go to a festival?” you can just say “yeah - it’ll be great fun to do it” and if they like it then perhaps next summer I’ll do it again. But I guess we just have to ride the crest of the wave and see what happens.

Are you bemused by the amount of interest?

[laughs heartily] Well in one way I understand… we’ve got a certain amount of credibility in the fact we’ve been doing a radio show for a number of years which is off the beaten track, left field stuff, so that part you can understand.

But we’d never even considered the fact that we might be able to play something live until we started getting an invite to play at the Redchurch Brewery in Bethnal Green - ‘we’ being me and my musical partner, Kavus Torabi [co-presenter of his radio show and current member of the legendary psychedelic act, Gong].  

We started doing a night there every second month and realised that even though we weren’t really advertising it much we had a certain amount of following, and then out of the blue the Bloc Weekend - Alex and George - got in touch with us, and said they’d listened to the radio show and said would we like to DJ down at Bloc Weekend? 

We thought this was fantastic! Then BBC iPlayer did this mini documentary called Steve Davis: Snookerstar DJ… 

Yeah I saw it. Quite a few people asked me about it and I had to convince them it wasn’t a spoof!

Well yeah, I guess anyone who is not aware of my sort of history in weird and strange music might think it is a spoof, but I think we’ve probably broken through now into people believing it’s for real… but am I bemused or not? It just shows you what can happen if you’ve got somebody who’s got a high profile but has also got some kind of musical credibility… then I think it works. 

Where it’s wrong is where if you’ve got somebody who says “I’m going to start DJing” but hasn’t got any musical pedigree - then it can’t work long term. The fact that we’re doing Glastonbury (above) and Tramlines and Castle Palooza and a few other little one offs is testament to the fact that even though this is all good fun, somebody believes that it’s credible. I think the word credibility is a big one.

One of the phrases you keep going back to in your book in a snooker context is “expectation suffocating talent”, so obviously DJing must be very liberating compared to when you were playing snooker because you’re no longer the man to beat - there isn’t that expectation.

Yeah, and also most of the gigs I do are with my mate Kavus so it’s fun… although at Tramlines it’s just me. And because at the moment it’s fresh and new, we haven’t really got any expectations as to what happens… we just go along and enjoy the evening. We’re not trying to beatmatch. We’re not trying to be anything other than an extension of “this is a record - we think this is fantastic, hope you think it’s fantastic”. 

But could there be a day when you do beatmatch? You’ve got an obsessive side. Could it grab you? Could it become an addiction where you push yourself technically?

Probably not, because the music that I like is not out-and-out techno. It doesn’t require mixing. That’s another skill and that’s for other people, but what we try to do is to effectively compliment what other people might be doing on the evening. 

If you have a whole night of techno, by the end of it, you might be technoed out. But it would be nice if somewhere down the line you had a bit more of an alternative, just for a respite of it really. Hopefully that’s where we’re gonna score points, where we’re offering something a little bit different just to break it up a bit.

Yes, it doesn’t happen enough. It doesn’t sound like rocket science when you put it like that i.e. posing an alternative, but by God, there are so many bland line ups out there with no variety whatsoever. I love techno as much as the next man, but what I would give to see more events where someone just stops the record from the last act and starts bowling people a few googleys.  

[Laughs] Yes exactly, although we’re going to sit down more and plan about how to keep the momentum going and try to work out how to build it up, drop it down a bit and build it back up again so at least we’ve got a bit more flow.  

There might be some overlap and blending but it’s more about someone hearing an individual record who goes, “What the fuck was that I just heard?!?”. So far we’ve had a lot of good feedback from people coming up to the booth and going, “I need to know what that is because that’s the best thing I’ve heard in ages - it was so different”, so that’s our sort of driving force.

Explain to the readers about how you got onto Surgeon…

I went to Hard Wax in Berlin. I went in asking for records that sounded like Oneohtrix Point Never and he said, “I don’t think we’ll have much that you don’t already know about”, so I said, “Could you give me some recommendations that you think I’d like that are not just basic techno?” The first record he pulled out was Surgeon 'Breaking The Frame'.

What an appropriate title for a snooker player!

[Laughs] I took it home to listen to it and thought, “I know it’s not necessarily what I’d normally listen to but I really like it - it’s great”. We played it a few times on the radio, and somewhere down the line, I can’t remember how now, I contacted Anthony [Surgeon] and said, “Do you fancy coming on the show and playing two hours of your favourite music?” So he came on the show and it’s been our biggest download ever since! 

It’s about ten times bigger than anybody else has ever done. And then to see him at a Bloc weekend doing it live with the synths… what was coming out of them was just astonishing. To think that nothing was pre-recorded - it was all just made up on the spot - it was like, “How the hell did he do that?” I’m just loathed to ask him for lessons, because maybe if he doesn’t like snooker, I can’t offer him snooker lessons in return!

Photo: Surgeon at Bloc Credit: Oliver Simcock

He’s a smart guy. I can remember booking him to DJ at a warehouse in Birmingham, and he turned up with a rolled up copy of a broadsheet newspaper… in French! He’s certainly not your average DJ. So have you ever messed about with a synth yourself?

Not really. I’d quite like to get one to see what sounds I can’t get out of it that he can! I’ve had Logic Pro and messed around with a little midi controller… but it’s a time thing and I think it’s also an imagination thing, and I’m not too sure that I’ve got that kind of an imagination, but it would be good fun trying. So I’m going to get a modular synth.

It seems like sometimes you can get something for nothing out of those and you can believe you’re clever even though you just basically switched it on and plugged something into something else.

It’s very easy for us DJs/clubbers to only see electronic music as something that exists in clubland. On the flip side, I’m curious to know whether you had any idea that the music you were obsessively collecting - let’s say the soul you had in the 70s/80s - was actually one of the foundations of a hedonistic club culture?

In the 80s and the 90s when I was listening to soul music I’d go to Rare & Racy in Sheffield and I’d be walking up Division Street… I didn’t know that I was walking past Warp Records. I wasn’t aware of any of that kind of thing at the time.

But then in retrospect, I’ve accidentally listened to stuff… and I’m still listening to records today and I’m thinking, “That’s a soul record - that’s a soul record that’s been dragged up into the modern-day”, and occasionally you’ll hear people sampling something, but even if they’re not sampling, you can hear that they’re effectively soul artists from a modern time. 

But that’s not the stuff I want to listen to because I feel like there are better soul artists than that. The [electronic] things I want to listen to are people who are doing Stravinsky-like things but on a computer, like Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker… they’re the ones. But that doesn’t work on a dance floor. I won’t play this stuff at Tramlines. But that’s the kind of stuff I really like to listen to. Groundbreaking in the way Stravinsky was. 

Basically, electronic composers…

Yeah exactly. But I think it’s great that somebody starts listening to some electronic music and likes it but it’s really soul music and they then get into original soul music as well. 

At this point Steve had to stop the interview, but despite the fact we’d already spoken for half an hour, he was very keen to talk some more. You sense he never gets tired of talking about music. “Call me at 8 o’clock tonight and we’ll do a proper job of it” he says.

So 8 o’clock comes, and a somewhat intoxicated Steve answers the phone, profusely apologising that's he spent the day getting drunk... 

"Honestly, I’ve been on it since I spoke to you earlier [lunch time]… are you able to talk tomorrow? I’ve been for a steak and wine day with some friends of mine in the wine industry, so we’ve been drinking stupidly expensive bottles of wine… it’s all turned ridiculous and now we’re off to the casino… I guess you can’t turn things like this down!"

And you couldn’t blame him, but this did bring up a serious point about what a top sportsman does to fill the days once his career is over. As appealing as a liquid lunch with unlimited wine may sound, surely it must sometimes be quite difficult to fill the void of snooker? This is where we resumed.

So now you’re outside the confines of snooker, has it ever been tough to adapt to life without that buzz of competition and the routine of practice?

For me, because it hasn’t happened quickly [he was playing very few tournaments in his latter years on the snooker tour], I think it’s easier to accept. But with someone like a footballer where more or less overnight you can go on the scrapheap, that’s more of a problem, or an athlete who gets an injury and suddenly it’s the end… it must be hard to know what happens next.

Fortunately I still play a few exhibitions and I enjoy myself on the tour when I do a bit of commentary on the BBC, so I’m not completely out of it. I would say that doing the DJing is a buzz, so in the short term anyway, the thrill we’re gonna have this summer doing a few festivals is an adrenaline rush in itself.

And let’s be honest, what I retired from was not like a normal office job. I always tried to stop myself saying “I’m off to work” because it wasn’t work really. My life was piss easy anyway!

Do you actually feel any nerves or butterflies when you DJ, like you might have done with snooker?

I’ve only done a couple so far, other than our Redchurch Brewery thing which is very laid back. It’s a completely different feeling to appearing at the crucible for the first time, but I definitely felt butterflies and nerves at Bloc Weekend and I really felt very self conscious to start with, but as our set unfolded, by the end of it, it was great fun. 

But to start with I really felt I was in this goldfish bowl, because you’re standing there at the decks, and there’s people standing right there in front of you and that’s quite a strange feeling of how to interact, and because it’s not been my sphere, I didn’t know how to act.

I bet you didn’t know where to look.

Yes you’re right, I didn’t know where to look! But fortunately my partner Kavus is a musician and he’s much more of a performer. He wasn’t embarrassed at all and he just went out there and gave it plenty and that calmed me down.

I think the more I do it, the more I’ll get used to what’s required and just have a laugh, and let’s be honest, there’s no point in getting particularly nervous… all you’re doing is playing records… you might as well have a laugh doing it. Mixing with vinyl in front of people - now that would be more scary.

What kind of stuff can we expect to hear at Tramlines?

From an electronic point of view, I’ll get some Surgeon in there, but it won’t be “boof boof” techno. I like James Holden, I think he’s brilliant. It depends on the room I guess. There’s other things that are left field like Charles Hayward. French Zeuhl music translates into a live situation quite well. And also bands like Alamaailman Vasarat (below) then an American Jewish collaboration called Charming Hostess. 

They’re good upbeat records, so mixing them in is taking it away from purely electronic, but they’re all in the same feelgood factor without being sellout to just the beat. 

How did your vinyl addiction actually start?

It was just what everybody was doing at that time. People bought records. I was buying them from the age of 15, 16. When I had a Saturday job I had just enough to buy an album, and then all of a sudden you get addicted to the acquiring of it. It was all sort of the scene. I used to go up to the Virgin Records shop - the original one in Oxford Street - just the thrill of going up to Virgin Records was a day out. 

Then you could listen to the records on headphones in little booths and try to discover something and there was a buzz in the place - it was absolutely full of people. And I think it’s a bit like if you go into Phonica these days or if you go into any place where there’s loads of decks where you can listen to the music… the place is buzzing and everybody’s feeding off each other. And obviously there was all this music coming out which was progressive rock, and that was new and exciting.

When you bought the vinyl, would you just listen to them at home without any distractions?

I would have done. I had a mate who was like minded at the time… we used to make tapes for each other so we’d cut the cost a bit so whatever he was buying I wasn’t buying, so we had a big tape collection as well. I can’t believe how many records we did get - I don’t know where the money came from! I now find that even though I’ve got a good sound system at home, I still find that the best time and the best place to listen new music is in the car. 

It gets harder and harder as life goes on to justify putting time aside to listen to music… and you’ve said it all actually… you’re killing two birds with one stone by putting it on in the car.

I think that’s actually a good thing you know. If you actually sit down physically to listen to music, you’re trying too hard. I think the best way to listen to it is when your mind is in a more receptive mode… letting it float over you is a better way of assimilating it.

Do you think it's funny that in the 80s the public were sold the persona that you were boring, but now you're being represented as this full-time techno dude? The complete polar opposite!

I’m now in a situation where it’s out in the media that I’m DJing and it’s sort of got out of hand with people saying I’m actually a techno DJ, which is another level of debauchery in some people’s eyes, and so just like in the 80s, you just go with the flow. 

Unless somebody comes along and sees you play or bothers to listen to the radio show and gets it, then you might as well just play along with the fact you are a techno DJ and that you don’t wake up before three in the afternoon and I’m probably playing until seven o’clock in the morning in some Berlin nightclub… and they believe it! And it’s great. It’s hilarious!

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