"A lot of dance music is about easily fitting in to genres," says Tom Rowlands.

"DJs can play your record because it sounds like this other record and then the DJ builds their set. Our idea was to sound totally different from the record that played before. Our desire was to make things that didn't fit in, that were almost accidental dance records."

In 1996 the Chemical Brothers released Setting Sun, a tribute to The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows featuring the vocals of Noel Gallagher.

A surprise number one, it established the duo as the first arena-sized act of the electronic movement. And nearly a decade on, when Orbital have called it quits, Underworld are in hibernation and The Orb, The Prodigy and Massive Attack are suffering mid-life dips, The Chemical Brothers are still making accidental hits.

Rowlands met fellow Medieval History student Ed Simons at Manchester University in the late Eighties. He had enrolled there because it was home to the legendary Hacienda nightclub - Simons because it was the birthplace of The Smiths and New Order.

As influenced by these pop groups as by the dominant DJ style of Balearic, they began hitting clubs with a dancerock-rap fusion, resulting in their famous residency at London's Heavenly Sunday Social.

But it wasn't until they began recreating this sound in their own bedroom studio, releasing debut album Exit Planet Dust in the Summer of 1995, that they signed themselves up as pioneers of Big Beat, a sound which lost none of its energy when transferred from the clubs to the radio.

Hits like Block Rockin' Beats and Hey Boy Hey Girl studded bombblasting beats with chewy guitar riffs and catchy vocal tags, making them the means by which indie kids were lured onto the dance floor. But the popularity of these loud and brassy club stompers has perhaps belied the Chemical Brothers' dexterity.

In the age of the iPod, Rowlands says, people just "load up the singles and hit shuffle".

He and Simons, on the otherhand, are "still obsessed by the idea of making an album that flows together.

The music moves from one extreme to the other and there are all these emotional changes."

Perhaps deliberately, then, fifth album Push The Button, released earlier this year, avoids big name collaborators and monster hooks, instead opting for a collection of beatwise psychedelia propelled by the rich, warm baritone of Bloc Party's Kele Okereke or the wordy raps of Q-Tip.

Any shift in the music, Rowland insists, has nothing to do with the birth of his second son - "it changes you as a person," he says, "but it's not as if all I listen to is the Tweenies' Hits".

If anything, he reckons, being a family man has made the live experience all the more intense.

"In the day I'll be at the zoo and then at night I'll be creating this intense psychedelic environment," he says.

"The change between day and night has heightened, and it's brilliant."