Doing a set on stage, the nerves are a match for playing at the Crucible'

IN one room a female performer is rapping in Spanish as a support band jams behind her, and students gyrate wildly on the dance floor.

- Matt Majendie

In another, someone more synonymous with the green baize than the red haze of the laser show that lights up his head is hunched over a modular synthesizer pumping out electronic music.

Musically, it is a far cry from the 1986 Chas and Dave hit Snooker Loopy on which Steve Davis was one of its star performers. Welcome to Bleep Klub, a collective techno jamming session on a Monday night of the week of the World Snooker Championship.

“If anyone told me my musical career would go further than Snooker Loopy, I’d have laughed,” says Davis, talking beforehand in a real ale pub serving oriental food in a bohemian part of Bristol where he relocated from Essex in part because of the city’s music scene. “I’ve had two hobbies — snooker and music — and both have exploded.”

This is a world detached from the Essex snooker halls where he toiled tirelessly to become the dominant force of his sport, winning six world titles in an era when the sport took off stratospherically. The most notable of which was a loss against Dennis Taylor on a final black in 1985, remarkably Davis’s favourite ever Crucible final despite being on the receiving end as some 18.5million Britons tuned in to watch the nailbiter.

Davis has long disproved the ‘Interesting’ tag sarcastically handed to him by Spitting Image — he still has his puppet — and he is superb company covering every topical imaginable from his current streaming series of choice, Seth MacFarlane’s Orville, to the rising train fares, and everything in between.