Mash-up duo right on cue
Medical Grade Music Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi White Rabbit, £20
What could six-time snooker world champion Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi, co-founder of hip indie math rock band The Monsoon Bassoon, possibly have in common?
The pair seem to go together as naturally as Hurricane Higgins and sobriety. But this amiable, unusual and occasionally impenetrable book is about a friendship forged through a shared love of avant-garde music, and their recent rebirth as The Utopia Strong, a trippy psychedelic trio completed by Michael J York from Coil. The two men recall their intertwining musical passions with self-effacing wit and no small measure of detail.
Steve, who became a techno DJ “by accident”, begins his journey in South London as a teenage fan of bands such as Henry Cow and Captain Beefheart, before jazz funk and jazz fusion caught his ear. In Plymouth, for Kavus – the Tehran-born son of an Iranian doctor and a nurse from Hull – life changed when he heard the Stray Cats’ feral rockabilly in 1980.
He played guitar with bands including Guapo, Gong and death metal combo Die Laughing, and mockingly refers to his “meteoric ascent from anonymity to obscurity”. The pair met at a Magma gig in Paris 12 years ago and Steve invited Kavus onto his show on community radio station Phoenix FM. They got on like a synthesiser on fire, and Kavus ended up as co-host.
Their leap from DJ-ing to forming a band seems to surprise even them.
Steve, now 63, had no musical training and admits that initially he was as much in control of his synth “as Frank Spencer… with a chainsaw”.
He and Kavus, 49, share a lifelong love of left-field sounds worthy of John Peel, and an anorak’s attention to trivia. You don’t need to know the difference between Egg and the Orgasm Guerrillas to enjoy this book.
But it probably helps.