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'Quite an odd experience: pissed on tequila, turning round and Fred Durst's there.' He frowns before returning to a familiar theme. When Steele DJed in Australia recently, Sid Wilson from Slipknot and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit showed up in the booth. If the arbiters of taste on the dance scene don't like it, there's plenty of people who do.

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'If I can make people dance and cry at the same time, I think I've done my job.' Then there's the fact that he's formed a full live band to tour it, with him as frontman, playing guitar and singing. 'I'm really trying to write songs rather than tunes,' he says. Perhaps his forthcoming album will temper the criticism. 'People used to write on Facebook, 'Fuck you, you make brostep.' I used to think, 'God, am I brostep?' But there's a track of mine called Haunt You, real mellow, and people were still coming out with, 'Oh, you're making brostep.'' His music isn't without its critics, who mock it as 'brostep', a subtlety-free racket aimed at hooting frat boys. 'Considering the amount of MDMA that was still in my system, I'm pretty shocked I managed to write a tune.' Over the years, his work has continued to spread by unlikely means: his best-known track, I Can't Stop, was sampled by Jay-Z and Kanye West on their album Watch the Throne and featured on the soundtrack of the Stop Kony 2012 viral video, which notched up 86m hits on YouTube. He made his first dubstep track the next day and promoted it through online forums. I never thought I belonged in that world.' The music he was playing and how he looked, I just thought, 'That's like me.' Until then, dance music felt really cool to me and I felt really uncool, like an outcast. He saw Rusko at London club Fabric the following week: 'This white boy from Leeds, absolute lunatic, jumping around wearing a weird cardboard bird hat. 'I hadn't thought of that,' he muses, 'but I do test out all my tracks to see how they sound on my laptop.'Ī fan of the Super Furry Animals and acoustic duo Turin Brakes, Steele hadn't heard any dubstep until he went to university at the end of 2008 someone played a mix by DJs Rusko and Casper at a party. He agrees, too, with one blogger's suggestion that part of its appeal might be down to the fact that, unlike a lot of bass-heavy music, it still sounds potent blaring from tinny laptop speakers – which is probably how most fans first hear it. 'It's not the connection I'm going for when I make the music, but I do see the similarities.'

We came back to England, did a show in Bedford, and 80 people turned up.' Although Steele seems slightly at a loss to explain his popularity in the US, he does talk vaguely about social networks, and nods at the suggestion that, dynamically, his music has more in common with heavy metal than the UK garage from which dubstep grew. We came on at 9pm and it was all over by midnight, more like a gig than a club, and we sold it out. 'Last year,' says Steele, 'we played in Chicago, for 3,500 people. Today, he finds himself at the forefront of one of the weirder developments in dance music history: the wholehearted embrace of dubstep (or at least a form of dubstep, one that replaces the spooked atmospherics and subtlety of Burial with distortion and aggression) by a mainstream American audience traditionally resistant to dance music, distrustful of its roots in gay culture and its lack of traditional musicianship. As he points out more than once, this time last year he was a student with ambitions to become a music teacher. He may be blithe about moshing, but there is a hint of disbelief to a lot of Steele's answers.

But it's fair to say that no one predicted it was going to end up as the soundtrack to shirtless American blokes shoving each other around. 'Actually, if there isn't a moshpit, I feel like I haven't done a good set.'Ī lot of expectations have been placed on dubstep since it emerged from south London at the end of the 1990s: its practitioners have been lauded as the vanguard of experimental urban music, nominated for the Mercury prize (Burial) and hailed as an influence on Britney Spears and Madonna. 'Happens at most shows,' grins Joshua Steele, better known as Flux Pavilion, after he and his schoolfriend Shaun 'Doctor P' Brockhurst have finished their DJ set. Yet there's no band – just two unassuming 23-year-olds from Northamptonshire playing CDs. Occasionally, a bout of moshing breaks out. This is like an audience at a rock concert. Someone tells me the audience is estimated at 8,000, but it's not the number that's so striking – it's the way they're behaving. I t's the middle of the afternoon on the final day of LA's Coachella festival, America's answer to Glastonbury, and the scene unfolding in the Sahara tent is striking.

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