There are many things that professional snooker players do when they decide the time has come to move on. They might become pundits, take to the chicken-and-chips after-dinner-speaking circuit or compete with amateurs to keep the cash rolling in. Former snooker pros do not as a rule morph into DJs playing out-there electronic music, wonky psychedelica and far-side techno thrillers.
Meet Steve Davis, the odd one out. For the past few years he has hosted The Interesting Alternative Show on Phoenix FM, a community radio station, with the Cardiacs, Gong and Knifeworld guitarist Kavus Torabi. In the past 12 months or so the pair have DJ'd at Bloc, Glastonbury and Castlepalooza, among other festivals.
You certainly wouldn’t have seen this coming. In his pomp on the table during the 1980s no one came close to Davis. He won the World Snooker Championship six times and picked up other titles as they took his fancy. He was the kingpin of the scene, the dude who was the centre of attention during that crazy decade when snooker was one of the biggest sports around.
But while the public perception was that Davis was a bit boring and one-dimensional, there was another side to him that very few knew about. When he wasn’t potting balls he was grooving to prog rock.
"We all go on a musical journey, and it was Magma who took me on a trip," Davis says. "They were the band. I met them at the Roundhouse in London in 1975, and from then on I was smitten, I was a Magma fan. I was never the same again, and my musical path was altered by meeting them. We play some Magma in our DJ sets. We'll play Futura, from Üdü Wüdü, and that usually kills it – or empties the room."
Davis draws some parallels between getting into “weird and wonderful and different music” and playing snooker.
“The thing about going to see bands like Magma was that I got a chance to hide away from the rest of the world. Then I started playing snooker and I also had the chance to hide away from the world,” he says. “When you’re born relatively ugly you have to choose things where you have the chance to get away from everybody. That’s why I took up listening to weird music and practising snooker eight hours a day. I didn’t want to go out to nightclubs and get a knockback.”
All that changed when Davis began to win championships. “I was about 21 when I realised that not all girls had staples in their stomachs. At the same time I began to make a lot of money from playing snooker. All of a sudden a lot of women used to find me much more attractive for some reason. A strange thing.”
Thrill of the challenge
Davis remembers his heyday fondly. “I miss the old days when I was winning, but I hated the new days when I was losing. I enjoyed the thrill of the challenge. I mean, my life was all balls. My life was about potting a ball into a small hole with a large pointed stick. If I wasn’t doing that I was hiding the ball from someone else with a similarly pointed stick,” he says.
“Meanwhile, someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder polishes the balls, puts them back on the table and slows the whole day down. We’d be finished by lunchtime if it wasn’t for this person. Now that I’ve retired I spend my days talking about people trying to put the balls in the holes with the pointy sticks. I find I make far less mistakes talking about the game than when I played it. That’s quite interesting, isn’t it?”
He also enjoyed all the trappings of fame.
“Back in 1987 I was voted rear of the year. The female winner was Sue Pollard, so that was the level of competition I was up against. Back in the 1980s I was also voted haircut of the year. I had ginger hair, a parting and dandruff.”
Snooker also took Davis into the charts. "We were in at number seven in 1986, with Snooker Loopy, which was a marvellous piece of pop music. We'd have been higher if it was not for Spitting Image's The Chicken Song. It was bad timing in terms of novelty records," he says. "It was a stupid idea, but when we got to number seven we were higher than Aretha Franklin, Madonna and Prince. How do you think they felt? We had a video on Top of the Pops and we met Chas & Dave. Not everyone gets to meet Chas & Dave."
Rare records
When Davis wasn’t playing with balls and pointy sticks, or hobnobbing with Chas & Dave, he was collecting records, which became an obsession.
“I remember there was a BBC DJ called Robbie Vincent. He used to play soul music, and I fell in love with it. That took me away from prog rock, but I’ve gone back to that now since I started the radio show. The show is a mixture of old and new music, which is probably a lot more adventurous and alternative than soul music,” he says.
“But there was a period when I was heavily into soul, which is a world of rare records – and often not a good world to be in, really. I spent a lot of money on rare records, but I’ve sold them now for even more money on eBay, which I then used to buy even more rare records from the alternative scene. It’s a never-ending circle. Once you start buying records you’ve had it. You can’t walk past a record store. In Dublin, All City is great, and I go to Phonica in London a lot.”
It’s clear that Davis relishes his new role as a DJ. What began as a radio show playing “weird, f**ked-up music” has become something entirely unexpected.
“I enjoyed the radio show and had a good life. Then Bloc invited us to play at their festival – and all of a sudden we were DJs. We don’t have a clue what we’re doing. The only sampling that goes on when we play a festival is the real ale. Beatmatching is out of our orbit. We’ve even played Glastonbury. The mud was everywhere,” he says.
“I loved Bloc. It was full of amazing people who liked techno and electronic music and the whole gamut of stuff. We had great fun with like-minded people who listen to a range of stuff, from Surgeon and Blawan to Autechre and Oneohtrix Point Never. We met Rob Brown from Autechre. It was like meeting royalty. It was like meeting Chas & Dave.”
What does he think his former snooker peers make of his new career? “The others just think I’m messed up. I got on with the others, apart from Alex Higgins; he was tough to get on with. He was fantastic but a little bit around the bend. Who else punched an official and nutted another at a press conference?” he says.
“But he was a character, and there are no characters now. They shouldn’t be shaking hands and wishing each other luck. If you want to be good at snooker you should nut somebody. Get off the sports pages, get on the front page.”
Known unknowns: Who’d play Steve Davis’s stage?
Now that Steve Davis is a regular of sorts on the festival circuit, it can only be a matter of time until a promoter hires him to curate a stage. Who would he book? “I’d have Knifeworld on it for a start. I’d have Jimmy Cake and lots of unknown bands. I’d mix the known bands with the unknown bands, because there are so many unknown bands out there that you don’t get to hear because it’s so hard to get a voice. What we try to do on the ‘Interesting Alternative Show’ is play more of those unknown bands. There’s so much bland shit out there that there needs to be more radio shows playing the good stuff. Not during the daytime but evening shows, specialist shows.”
Steve Davis plays the Out to Lunch Weekender at Bar Tengu/Yamamori, in Dublin, on Sunday, August 14; outtolunch.ie
