In 2022 progressive music’s unlikeliest trio, The Utopia Strong, launched their second album International Treasure. Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Michael J York told Prog how Timothy Leary, experiments on a cheap Chinese zither and a sports promoter accidentally led to the release.
The Utopia Strong didn’t realise they were becoming a band when they visited musician Michael J York’s home in Glastonbury in January 2018 for a modular synth jam. But they’d left a recorder running through their 13-hour session, and on returning from an extended sojourn to the pub, discovered – much to their surprise – that it all sounded rather good.
Even as a musical formation began, there was something odd about the group. Kavus Torabi and York had plenty of previous experience in classic bands – including Gong and Coil respectively – but their compadre was not only a novice: he was six-time 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. Well, Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis is certainly having the last laugh.
“I saw you on telly the other night, Steve,” says York on our Zoom call, teasingly. He’d been watching Davis discussing snooker at the Crucible. But the buttoned-up gentleman commentator is a long way from the relaxed Essex sexagenarian who chats about Gentle Giant and getting hammered on six per cent IPA. At one point Torabi calls him “the Bill Werbeniuk of prog.”
“Well, I know what I’m talking about on TV,” Davis says. “But I don’t know what I’m talking about with this – I’m winging it, and it’s great!”
We’ll dispense with talk of snooker. Davis has paid his dues, toured the length and breadth of the country and supported his all-time favourite band, Magma, at the Garage in June. What’s more, The Utopia Strong’s second official album is a great leap forward sonically. Like its predecessor it relies on the whims of the modular synth – famously impossible to control with any exactitude – but International Treasure is a deeply assured follow-up to their 2019 self-titled debut.
These are textural, ambient ’scapes that have been honed to perfection and garnished with cosmic energy from additional musical paraphernalia, namely York’s pipes and Torabi’s guzheng (a Chinese zither that he got cheap out the back of a shop in Camden). It’s fair to say that this new album is thrice more cosmic.
“Yeah, it feels nice,” says Davis proudly. “When we listened back, I think that’s how we felt. We’re just hoping everybody else thinks it’s a progression.”
“I won’t say we didn’t know what we were doing with the last one,” laughs Torabi. “We sort of knew what we were doing – but we didn’t know what the band was, exactly. For instance, on the first album I don’t think we would have necessarily started a song by going, ‘Let’s do something with the guzheng.’ But that became the track Shepherdess. We know our music and know how the band works now, so it seemed perfectly reasonable and perfectly natural.”
The Alice Coltrane-inspired Shepherdess is expansive in other ways too, with celestial voices, jazzy horns swimming in delay, interstellar gongs and even an undercurrent of skittering drums. “We still started it the same way though, didn’t we?” remembers York. “Then, after a few sessions working on it, we deviated and started building from scratch without improvising first.”
The track International Treasure was the first to emerge in those early sessions, a name they wanted for the debut album, but which Rocket Records wouldn’t let them use. Having sold a reasonable amount of vinyl, they had more bargaining power this time.
“I still think it’s my favourite track I’ve ever had anything to do with, in all these years of making music,” says Torabi. “I absolutely love it. Once we got that one near to completion, we had the sound that almost dictated the tone of the rest of the album.”
Another epic, The Islanders, came out sounding “Aphex Twin-y,” according to Davis, existing for several months under the working title Warpfied. “I’d buy it!” says Davis. The album concludes with the Balearic beat of Castalia, a dreamy soundworld with a pulsing undercurrent, inspired by the LSD experiments of Timothy Leary.
“It started out being called Banana Nest,” Torabi reveals. “But I always thought Castalia was a lovely-sounding word, you know; sort of really twinkly and psychedelic. To me, the track feels like somewhere between Belfast by Orbital and Sunrain by Ashra.”
The album was recorded at Davis’ house in Essex, where he now has a studio. The raw tracks were sculpted by York while Davis and Torabi lay on couches, drinking and telling him which bits to fade out and which to bring up. It was later engineered by Rob Kelly. It’s an unconventional approach that works well for them.
My mate bought a load of lateral flow tests before they were a thing. I stole some – so we had a couple of get-togethers
Steve Davis
“I did nearly delete the whole album one night though, didn’t I?” says York. Luckily they retrieved the files in the nick of time. And they had another stroke of luck too, being able to meet up at certain stages during lockdown, thanks to friends in high places.
“My mate, who’s into sports promotion, was trying to get the government to let him put some events on behind closed doors,” says Davis. “So he bought a load of lateral flow tests before they were a thing. I stole some – so we had a couple of get-togethers and we knew we were as safe as houses because we had these tests. It was beautiful.”
“So Barry Hearn facilitated the new album, then?” asks Torabi.
“He got it up to running speed,” quips Davis. “What he couldn’t do is get the pressing times down to six months.”
Where The Utopia Strong end up is anyone’s guess, but the camaraderie is as solid as the name implies. “It’s been absolutely wonderful,” gushes Davis. “The whole thing has been a complete eye opener, watching the process and watching how clever they both are on stage.”
Torabi has no doubt there’ll be more music. “It probably sounds corny to say it, but there’s something about what we do; and whatever it is – we struggle to explain it ourselves – it’s really magical. When the three of us get together and create this stuff it comes out as incredibly psychedelic. It sounds really exploratory and extremely visual to me and it opens up a portal. It’s mapping out the architecture of another dimension!
“That, to me, is what the Utopia Strong does. While we’re together talking about it and making it, there’s really nothing else I’d rather be doing.”
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