If the world's top-ranking EDM DJs won't even open their headphone case for less than a quarter of a million dollars a night, when they do, they tend to unlock Pandora's pyro box. They're the new lords of pop spectacle: Avicii packs more lasers than a Jean Michel Jarre gig on the Death Star, Skrillex surfs spaceships for a living and Calvin Harris marks every drop with fireworks, steam-blasts and ticker tape while barking, "I wanna see you jump!" and, "Put your hands in the air right now!" like a particularly strident gym instructor.
David Guetta – the French producer behind iTunes's most downloaded song ever, the Black Eyed Peas's I Gotta Feeling, as well as virtually every track you've heard in Topshop since 2002 – combines all three to create a miniature arena show of indoor rockets, laser webs and kitsch retro visuals. His primary skill is in finding chart-busting choruses and letting them breathe, before crushing them with steam-hammer beats: Sia is given plenty of space to warble on billowing pop edifice Titanium, while there are stretches of Guetta's recent Morricone-inflected No 1 Lovers on the Sun that you'd swear were a Wild West Shins song.
But he connects more solidly than most EDM big-hitters because he deploys cross-generational reference points that feed a communal cultural nostalgia. The Cher-aping Shot Me Down and the pinball mania of Bad are drenched in comic-book visuals of gun-toting cowgirls and zombies attacking a cartoon Bruce Willis. Guetta leads singalongs to Wonderwall and Seven Nation Army, conducts Radio Ga Ga handclaps and appears to have discovered that repeatedly raving up the theme to 70s cult kids show Roobarb & Custard (à la Shaft) is the secret trigger to the brain's euphoric frug nodes. Throw in a regular sprinkling of current club hits – Harris's Summer, Sigma's Nobody to Love, Guetta's own Play Hard and When Love Takes Over – and you have a set that leaves your chest thumping and your nostrils clogged with more pyro smoke than new year in Dubai.
