Sirens used to be a Chemical Brothers trademark effect, and when one howled its way through the Roundhouse just as the venue was filling up, some at first put it down to a late soundcheck. Then came the order to evacuate the building – sadly, not a cheeky sample, but a real fire alarm that left the crowd stranded in the street for 90 minutes.

The show finally started half an hour before it was due to finish, but from the moment the unshaven dance duo stepped on stage to the strains of a looped vocal from the new number No Path to Follow, fans switched straight to party mode. That the Chemical Brothers have survived the boom and bust of the dance business commercially unscathed is impressive enough. That they can transport an audience ageing with them back to rave’s heyday in less than a minute is extraordinary.

Exactly what Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons do on stage has long been a matter of debate. Producers rather than DJs, they claim to recreate every aspect of their music live and they were certainly busy all night. Pausing only occasionally to punch the air, or in Simons’s case, to emerge from behind enough equipment to launch a space shuttle and shuffle his feet, they twiddled banks of knobs, played keyboards suspended at shoulder height and sped past each other in a race to push buttons.

Some songs were reworked – Galvanise swapped its thundering techno beats for a carnival vibe; Hey Boy, Hey Girl sped up and slowed down at random; and Out of Control had its parts reshuffled, then set to samples from Primal Scream’s Don’t Fight It, Feel It.

Yet this was probably the Chemical Brothers’ most conventional set of their 15-year career. Rather than hop in and out of hits, they played 20 songs from start to finish, dropping a handful of tracks from their soon-to-be-released, sixth album, We Are the Night, between classics that turned the dancefloor into a mass moshpit. Of the former, the ska-infused All Rights Reserved and a frequency-undulating Do It Again proved that the pair haven’t lost their touch. Whether their fans stick with them past 40, though, is a worry on the horizon.

Chemical Brothers play the Rockness festival on June 9 and Glastonbury on June 24

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