Steve Davis & Kavus Torabi

Steve Davis & Kavus Torabi: Medical Grade Music

Steve Davis is a six time World Snooker Champion, BBC snooker ‘pundit’ and well-known enthusiast for out-there music.

Kavus Torabi, a member of Gong, Cardiacs and many other underground psychedelic bands.

They met many years ago and forged a friendship through a shared love of cult experimental music. They became DJs – both on the live circuit and on their monthly ‘Fire Shuffle’ show on NTS – and they are now The Utopia Strong, a band with a celebrated album release and many gigs behind them. This event tells the story of two outsiders and obsessives whose collision prompted an evangelistic alliance on the furthest frontiers of underground music.

Both Steve and Kavus will be heading to the centre to talk about their co-authored book, Medical Grade Music as part of the Wolverhampton Literature Festival

The overall sound was pretty accidental” reckons Kavus Torabi. “I certainly didn’t expect the music to sound so ecstatic and positive, Without wanting to puncture the mystery, there really felt like an element of magic at play in making this album. For the most part it was incredibly effortless”

“The band evolved from having had so much fun together and also sharing similar musical tastes” continues Steve Davis, “Mike (York) was living in Glastonbury where Kavus and I DJ’d in 2017. We all hung out together during the festival and the Utopia Strong was born. The name came later and I suppose reflects the fact that – once we’d jammed together and listened back to the improvising – the music felt pretty euphoric and otherworldly. It was very psychedelic but also strangely wonky”

It was never any secret that Davis – even at the peak of his household name status in the 1980s – was as happy putting a needle on a vinyl record as anything else involving a cue. Renowned as an aficionado of soul, jazz-funk and progressive rock from the seventies onwards, he famously once single-handedly promoted three nights at the Bloomsbury Theatre for French esoteric leviathans Magma, so frustrated was he by their absence from British shores.