It's 1994 and, for the most part, Glastonbury still thinks live dance music is a contradiction in terms. OK, The Orb have done it a few times. Underworld have played in a tiny field. But it's like that annoying roadie's been telling the pair all day long: "What exactly do you do? Twiddle a few knobs on your DAT player...?" So when Orbital kick-start their first tune, one phrase keeps cycling round in Paul's head. "Get it right. Get it right. Get it right." To say that they do is a bit like saying Picasso was quite handy with a paintbrush. Trademark beams shooting from their glasses, Orbital take their cues from the crowd, picking up on sections that work and spinning them into giddy euphoria. Jamming on stage, they draw out keyboard lines for an eternity, or drop them in later to mind-scrambling effect. And when the final notes of 'Chime' fade away, the brothers Hartnoll can't believe the roar 40,000 people can produce. "We were so happy," remembers Phil. "We just had a little dance together. It felt like we were little children again. We used to do this funny little dance before we got into the bath. That whole feeling came back."

THE pre-bath dance was something of a ritual growing up in Sevenoaks. "We'd be doing the bumps, banging our bums together," says Paul. "And we'd have this little song going..." "Psh-ke-bum! Psh-ke-bum!" offers Phil, helpfully. "He always had the end with the taps," blushes Paul. They moved to Sevenoaks, in the Kent commuter belt, when Phil was eight, Paul just four. Their dad, a plasterer by trade, had bought his own house, a ramshackle place stuffed with books and badly in need of modernisation. They were happy enough, but it was while living here that Paul got The Fear. "When I was little I'd just wake up screaming," says Paul. "I used to lie in bed in mortal terror hearing this spring noise. Boing...! Boing...! I knew what it was. It was a giant slinky thing bouncing up the stairs." Paul can pinpoint the moment the nightmares started. He was watching an old movie on TV. It was a comedy, a horror skit. But what freaked Paul out was the organ. Not just the spooky Bach music, but the way the keys moved of their own accord. When he saw that, he screamed loudly enough to wake the dead. "After that I wouldn't go upstairs alone, even in daylight," says Paul. "There was something wrong about that house. I never saw a ghost there, but I felt there was something Amityville Horror about it. The strangest thing was, I ended up making a career out of getting keyboards to play themselves. It's almost like trying to exorcise my fear." Long before either of them picked up a sampler, Paul and Phil had both been into punk. They did the things punks did: shaving their heads into mohicans, parading round Sevenoaks with a ghetto blaster, sharing ten Bensons and half a bottle of Bacardi in the park. Once, Phil decided to bleach his hair. He knew what he wanted: two white streaks, one on either side of his head. "I was like, bleach? Domestos? Makes sense..." Phil winces. "That pure raw bleach just stung like mad! My hair was just reduced to these frazzled white bits." His best friend at the time, Jim Whiteleg, remembers him as a bit of a loose cannon. "His parents would let him dye his hair and draw over his clothes. Before music, art was a big thing for him." It was to be seven years before Paul got his first proper mohican, a tasteful combination of three pink and black stripes.