Maximum Break
Progressive music’s unlikeliest trio are back with a new studio album. The Utopia Strong’s Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Michael J York tell Prog how Timothy Leary, experiments on a discounted Chinese guzheng, and a sports promoter accidentally led to the creation of their second official release, International Treasure.
Words: Jeremy Allen Images: David Ryder Prangley
The Utopia Strong, L-R: Kavus Torabi, Steve Davis, Michael J York.
“We know our music and know how the band works now, so [a second album] seemed perfectly reasonable and perfectly natural.”
Kavus Torabi
The Utopia Strong have come a long way since inadvertently forming four years ago. The most unlikely trio since the Holy Trinity didn’t even realise they were becoming a band when they descended on musician Michael J York’s home in Glastonbury in January 2018 for a modular synth jam. Crucially, the trio left a tape recorder running throughout their marathon 13-hour session, and on returning from an extended sojourn to the pub, discovered – much to their surprise – that it all sounded rather good.
Tentatively, a musical formation began to occur, though there was something odd about this group. Kavus Torabi and York had plenty of previous experience in classic bands, including Gong and Coil respectively, but their modular-playing compadre was not only a musical novice, he also happened to be sixtime World Snooker champion Steve Davis. For those old enough to remember, Davis is a sportsman so famous that during the 1980s he had his own latex puppet on UK TV show Spitting Image, and acquired an ironic epithet, interesting, which stuck. Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis is certainly having the last laugh.