You barely notice pivotal moments when they're happening. Not so at the Glastonbury festival on the night of Saturday 25 June 1994 when the NME Stage experimented with dance music in the face of an indie crowd still sceptical of music without guitars. I remember dragooning a parade of dehydrated, disoriented walking wounded into yomping across baked earth with the exhortation: you have to see Orbital.
The show was a revelation that changed the nature of the festival. Brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll played uncompromising, uncut, complex but fantastically thrilling electronics, their heads bobbing up and down inside their control tower with only their trademark torch spectacles visible like two extraterrestrials. Techno bled into drum'n'bass into dream-like abstract reveries, and some 40,000 people roared the Hartnolls on, bringing to life the paradox of dance music: there's nothing so human as machine music. A year later Glastonbury had a Dance Tent. Now it has a whole Dance Village, with a host of stages catering for everything from techno to dubstep, drum'n'bass to future garage, acid house, disco, soul and funk, with headliners such as Fatboy Slim playing alongside Carl Cox, Pete Tong and the Chemical Brothers.
Before Orbital went onstage they were sick with fear, but the triumph of the show made them festival icons. "At the end we did the dance we used to do when we were little kids and naked and about to get in the bath," says Paul Hartnoll, "banging our bottoms together and laughing. It was just brilliant. It was like, we've made it."
