It’s a Monday night in the Essex suburb of Shenfield and the Tandoori Nights restaurant is playing My Heart Will Go On to its handful of customers. But six-time world snooker champion Steve Davis would rather talk about Oneohtrix Point Never.
“He’s just so clever,” he says. “He’s like a modern-day composer, as clever as Stravinsky or Bartók.” He chucks out the names of more electronic producers he reveres, each more obscure than the last: Patten, Sanguine Hum, Katie Gately. “They may not be able to play musical instruments – it doesn’t matter. They create masterpieces that will be revered in 200 years.”
Davis is having his ritual curry ahead of his weekly show at the nearby radio station Phoenix FM, which he has been hosting since 1996, freaking out suburbia with prog, post-punk and mangled electronics. It’s led to an improbable booking, with Davis joining the bill of the revered Bloc festival at Butlin’s Minehead, alongside Thom Yorke, Four Tet and such techno legends as Jeff Mills and Carl Craig. “I’m like a kid waiting for Christmas,” he grins, mulling over his DJ name. “I’m either going to be DJ Thundermuscle or Rocky Flame.”
Davis’s first love as a boy was the eccentric songwriting of the Canterbury scene in the early 1970s – acts like Soft Machine and Caravan – before he fell for prog. “Gentle Giant would have been my band rather than Yes – I liked the weird end. So less Genesis, more Magma.” Indeed, it was the cosmic French collective Magma, known for singing 40-minute tracks in a made-up language, that would induce in him a teenage musical epiphany. “I get moments of elation watching them, when you don’t even care where you are. It’s lovely.”
Flush with cash from his snooker career, Davis managed to set them up with a London residency. “I didn’t want to go to France – my French A-level wasn’t up to scratch. So I basically paid for them to come over for three days in Bloomsbury.” His manager, Barry Hearn, brought the boxing promoter Frank Warren to a gig. “I said, ‘Please don’t go. You’re not going to like it.’ After half an hour, Barry’s wife is going, ‘What is this pile of shit? Let’s go to a restaurant!’”
This was payback of a kind, after Hearn had cajoled Davis into a trip to the Grand Ole Opry during a snooker trade fair in Nashville. “Country and western singers came on one after another. It was the most polite concert I’d ever been to. Barry was in his element, drooling over Dolly, or Slim somebody singing about the dog they’d lost. I fell asleep. With country, I can’t imagine having those moments where you punch the air with excitement.”
As snooker took over Davis’s life, music was crowded out and he missed out on punk entirely. “At one stage, I was playing snooker eight hours a day in a working men’s club, and you wouldn’t hear blokes there saying, ‘Have you heard the latest Sex Pistols single?’ They were still singing Delilah on a Saturday night.”
But by the mid-80s, Davis had become a sweaty-palmed soul collector. “I was into the gospel-like vocals: the euphoria and the passion of being in love, or out of love, or back in love again. It’s a pretty tried and tested formula. There’s arguably fewer storylines than in country and western.”
As well as scoring a top 10 hit with Snooker Loopy, assisted by Chas & Dave, Davis gradually rediscovered his prog roots, switching his radio show from soul to “fucked up weird stuff”. Was this far-out music a way to balance the intense calm needed for snooker? “I don’t really know,” he says, batting away any opportunity to dwell on the game. “Take Frank Zappa – the complex stuff he did with a Synclavier that was apparently unplayable by humans. I can’t understand why other people don’t like it. They all think I’m fucking mad.”
His next big discovery was the shapeshifting beats of Autechre: “Trying to work out the time signature was out of my league. I just thought, ‘That’s good!’” He says he’s now longing for a trip to the legendary Berghain techno club in Berlin, even though he’s not much of a dancer. “I’m a foot-tapper, there’s no coordination. Well, not absolutely none. My favourite record to dance to is Be Faithful by Fatman Scoop, or James Brown – jerky rhythm is all I can do, nothing smooth.” Will he be jerking around at Bloc? “Depends if there’s real ale there.”
His co-presenter, prog journeyman Kavus Torabi, joins us for a korma, and we head to the station, a tiny cabin round the back of a leisure centre. Davis dashes about like a trainspotter with a rare find, sticking on Finnish brass bands and reminiscing about the good old days: “I was once arse of the year!” He and Torabi have a good line in banter, Davis deadpanning “Don’t you just love the early Abba stuff?” following a bit of deranged klezmer. After enquiring about another song’s identity, I’m passed the CD cover: it’s a painting of John Prescott operating a sewing machine.
Just as I’m thinking how much all this undermines the ironic “Interesting” nickname he picked up in the 1980s, Davis suddenly decides to fill me in about the current state of snooker. “There’s been a slow change in improvement in people’s sat navs around the table – they’ve got better routes. The players have also become far more aggressive, because they have to. It’s kill or be killed.”
Although he still commentates for the BBC, his playing days are behind him. After a recent incident in Manchester, he thinks he might now actually be better known for his musical tastes. “I was in a delicatessen and, after I left, one of the blokes working there ran after me and said, ‘I love techno!’”
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