For much of the past decade, the Chemical Brothers seemed indestructible. They topped the charts, broke audience records at Glastonbury, and even won a Grammy award in the US. Now in their thirties with wives and children, however, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have seen their critical and commercial stock decline in recent years as fashion moved on from an increasingly sickly dance music scene.

Even so, the live arena remains a Chemicals forte, and the deadpan duo were on bullish form at the opening night of their latest tour in Manchester on Friday. Few people present at the rammed, sweltering show would agree that this is a band in decline. Right from the propulsive techno-gallop of the opening number, Hey Boy, Hey Girl, it was clear that Rowlands and Simons remain grand masters at working a crowd into a frenzy. If audience excitement is an accurate gauge of a successful rock show, Friday’s set consisted almost entirely of highs with very few lows.

The latest Chemicals album, Push The Button, has received mixed reviews, but it translates well live. A slowed-down, beefed-up version of the underwhelming recent single, Galvanise, finally lived up to its name, with deafening jackhammer beats that even had the Apollo bar staff dancing. Another highlight was the soaring version of the album’s epic finale, Surface To Air, its brazen, New Order allusions underlined when it segued into the cult Manchester quartet’s classic single, Temptation. It was an inspired act of homage.

Dissenters have long dismissed Rowlands and Simons as taciturn boffins, but it is precisely this quality that has helped them to weather the fortunes of club culture. Rather than composing the kind of abstract hymns to hedonism that characterised much mainstream dance music, the Chemicals have built some of the moody drama and intellectual baggage of rock into their densely layered, deceptively well crafted sound.

Even the accompanying video footage was full of arresting images, from bloody police battles during the miners’ strike, to architectural drawings of cathedrals that resembled sinister insects.

Crouched behind a Star Trek flight deck of electronic equipment, Simons and Rowlands remained barely visible throughout their 90-minute set, only occasionally venturing to the stage front for an energetic pogo. Purists might question whether they needed to be present at all, given how much of their meticulously sequenced collage of beats and samples appeared to be pre-programmed. But this kind of nit-picking crumbles in the face of the duo’s onslaught of exhilarating noise. Whatever the Chemical Brothers do up there, they still push the right buttons.

Tour continues: Wolverhampton Civic Hall tomorrow; Brixton Academy, London, Friday and Saturday, March 18, 19.

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