It’s been more than 30 years since Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons first took to the electronic music scene with a bold, infectious evolution of the UK’s burgeoning ‘big beat’ style. Now on their tenth album and never failing to challenge and innovate, their performances have risen to overwhelming, titanic proportions.

With standing tickets at the O2 having sold out in a matter of hours, a dark sea of dance music fans has gathered as if on a pilgrimage to a higher state of being. At the strike of nine, a drone rises, leading into the chest-shaking beat drop of synth-rap opener Go, and the arena explodes into light. This is the experience of their live shows today, their vast and diverse repertoire completed by equally colourful and outlandish visuals by collaborators Smith and Lyall, who have developed into an indispensable part of the band’s image and appeal. The following 2 hours are a joyful sensory bombardment, ranging from elegant and dreamlike, to lurid and unsettling, to utterly euphoric.

People, creatures and patterns leap across the screen like a rave ballet - confetti rain accompanies a strobe fusillade during the seismic buildup of Got to Keep On; huge balloons are dispatched into the arena for the bombastic release of Saturate; the iconic and enduring red and blue robots turn Chemical Beats into a gnarly acid house extravaganza. Along with the timeless heavy-hitters making an inevitable return, a number of new additions to their setlist make for unexpected highlights. Goodbye is both kinetically forceful and surprisingly touching, its cavernous payoffs making for a cathedral-like live experience. Equally touching is The Darkness That You Fear, its looping mantras inviting the audience to let go and lose themselves in the beautiful flow of a music crowd, accompanied by gorgeous rainbows bursting out overhead. Nothing, however, quite compares to the absolute freakout of oft-overlooked masterpiece The Private Psychedelic Reel, which closes out the set with a rapture of distorted breakbeats, Beatles-esque sitar drones, sound effects flying past at warp speed, and about 3 different clarinet solos(!), all set to religious depictions of the triumph of good over evil. As the band’s closing motto of ‘love is all’ flashes up on screen, you’re left on a buzzing high of adrenaline, serotonin and, purely through being in that crowd, love. This is what live electronic music can and should be, and there’s no one out there doing it quite like the Brothers.