A son-et-lumière spectacular: The Chemical Brothers at the O2 Arena reviewed

How does one account for the phenomenon that is the Chemical Brothers, a quarter of a century on from their first records, just getting bigger and bigger? Only now are they touring the arenas of the UK for the first time. They’re nominated for a Grammy. Their current album, No Geography, is a top-five hit. Wasn’t the 1990s dance-music explosion meant to have ended with, well, the 1990s? They’re not alone either: Underworld, too, are now playing arenas, and not just to people who want to shout the refrain to ‘Born Slippy’: ‘Lager! Lager! Lager! Lager!’

Perhaps there’s something in the fact that neither group was completely contained by dance music. A friend was telling me recently about seeing the Chems — then still called the Dust Brothers — DJing in the basement of the Albany pub in central London, at the famous Sunday Social nights. What they played — house and hip-hop, but also the Beatles, the Clash, the Specials — was utterly unlike the staple diet in most house clubs. ‘And I realised,’ my friend said, ‘they weren’t like the old soul boys who DJed in most places. They were like me!’

My friend also noted, with a middle-aged shudder at his own recklessness, that he used to drop acid at five in the afternoon before going to the Sunday Social. God knows, you wouldn’t want to risk that with their current son-et-lumière spectacular: there were times when the visual effects were so enveloping — white lines forming a tunnel on the giant screen behind them, with spotlights projecting those same lines out into the audience — that I felt a little queasy on nothing more than a couple of pints of pale ale.

The Chemical Brothers persist, perhaps because they were always a little off to the side of dance music’s trends, and also because they remained anonymous.