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.

How dubstep was discovered.