Steve Davis is a snooker player who won six world titles in the 1980s. He was known for his emotionless and robotic style, which earned him the attention of the ITV puppet show Spitting Image. However, he is now known as a top DJ who has performed at Glastonbury Festival and supported Blur at Wembley Stadium.
At the 40th Brecon Jazz Festival this weekend, Davis will perform with his musical collaborator Gaz Williams. They promise to deliver a unique immersive sound and light experience at the festival’s cathedral. The duo will play a modular synthesizer, which creates hypnotic soundscapes of loops, samples, drones, and textures. Davis said that while what they do isn’t jazz, they are improvising, which is similar to jazz.
Davis started DJing after retiring from the snooker world and began playing classic dance bangers, techno, and rock. But he became more interested in modular synthesizers after seeing someone playing one at a club in Soho. He got hooked and began disappearing down that particular rabbit hole.
Gaz Williams first met Steve Davis at the 2016 Greenman festival in Powys. Williams plays a modular synth by sending random voltage through different modules, which clamp and shape it. The duo will perform three 20-minute pieces on the festival’s new Mindset stage. Each of those pieces is a rough sketch that they’ll play with and expand upon, asking the audience to come with them on a journey and see what happens.
Davis said that he loves the fact that they’re not totally in control and that much of what comes out is a happy accident. It’s certainly a far cry from Snooker Loopy, the 1986 Chas ‘n’ Dave hit on which Davis featured, alongside such other great players as Dennis Taylor and Terry Griffiths. Davis said that he is happy being a bit of a novelty and doesn’t have the ego to demand anyone take him seriously as a musician
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