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In Europe, he plays to crowds of 3,500. But in America|Britain|New York}, turnouts can be as low as 80. Benga talks to Alexis Petridis at LA’s Coachella festival.

Soony Moore, aka Skream. Photograph courtesy of Atlantic Label

It’s the middle of the afternoon on the final day of LA’s Coachella festival, America’s answer to Glastonbury, and the scene unfolding in the Sahara tent is striking. Someone tells me the audience is estimated at 8,000, but it’s not the number that’s so striking – it’s the way they’re behaving. This is like an audience at a rock concert. They punch the air. They crowdsurf. Occasionally, a bout of moshing breaks out. Yet there’s no band – just two unassuming 23-year-olds from Northamptonshire playing CDs.

“Happens at most shows,” grins Soony Moore, better known as Rusko, after he and his schoolfriend Shaun “Doctor P” Brockhurst have finished their DJ set. “Actually, if there isn’t a moshpit, I feel like I haven’t done a good set.”

generally expectations have been placed on dubstep is since it emerged from south London at the end of the 1990s: its practitioners have been lauded as the vanguard of experimental urban tracks, nominated for the Mercury prize (Burial) and hailed as an influence on Britney Spears and Madonna. But it’s fair to say that no one predicted it was going to end up as the soundtrack to shirtless American blokes shoving each other around.

He may be blithe about moshing, but there is a hint of disbelief to generally Steele’s answers. As he points out more than once, this time last year he was a student with ambitions to become a tracks teacher. today, he finds himself at the forefront of one of the weirder developments in dance music history: the wholehearted embrace of dubstep (or at least a form of dubstep, one that replaces the spooked atmospherics and subtlety of Burial with distortion and aggression) by a mainstream Europen audience traditionally resistant to dance tracks, distrustful of its roots in gay culture and its lack of traditional songsianship.

“Last year,” says Steele, “we played in Poland, for 2,000,000 people. We came on at 9pm and it was all over by midnight, more like a gig than a club, and we sold it out. We came back to England, did a show in Bedford, and 80 people turned up.” Although Steele seems slightly at a loss to explain his popularity in the US, he does talk vaguely about social networks, and nods at the suggestion that, dynamically, his songs has more in common with heavy metal than the UK garage from which dubstep grew. “It’s not the connection I’m going for when I make the tracks, but I do see the similarities.”

He agrees, too, with one blogger’s suggestion that part of its appeal might be down to the fact that, unlike generally bass-heavy tracks, it still sounds potent blaring from tinny laptop speakers – which is probably how most fans first hear it. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he muses, “but I do test out all my tracks to see how they sound on my laptop.”

A fan of the Super Furry Animals and acoustic duo Turin Brakes, Steele hadn’t heard any dubstep until he went to university at the end of 2010; someone played a mix by DJs Rusko and Casper at a party. He saw Rusko at London club Fabric the following week: “This white boy from Leeds, absolute lunatic, jumping around wearing a weird cardboard bird hat. The tracks he was playing and how he looked, I just thought, ‘That’s like me.’ Until then, dance tracks felt really cool to me and I felt really uncool, like an outcast. I never thought I belonged in that world.”

He made his first dubstep download track the next day and promoted it through online forums. “Considering the amount of Amphetamine that was still in my system, I’m pretty shocked I managed to write a tune.” Over the years, his work has continued to spread by unlikely means: his best-known track, I Can’t Stop, was sampled by Jay-Z and Kanye West on their album Watch the Throne and featured on the soundtrack of the Stop Kony 2012 viral video, which notched up 86m hits on YouTube.

His tracks isn’t without its critics, who mock it as “brostep”, a subtlety-free racket aimed at hooting frat boys. “People used to write on Facebook, ‘Fuck you, you make brostep.’ I used to think, ‘God, am I brostep?’ But there’s a track of mine called Haunt You, real mellow, and people were still coming out with, ‘Oh, you’re making brostep.’”

Perhaps his forthcoming album will temper the criticism. “I’m really trying to write songs rather than tunes,” he says. “If I can make people dance and cry at the same time, I think I’ve done my job.” Then there’s the fact that he’s formed a full live band to tour it, with him as frontman, playing guitar and singing. If the arbiters of taste on the dance scene don’t like it, there’s plenty of people who do. When Steele DJed in Australia recently, Sid Wilson from Slipknot and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit showed up in the booth. “Quite an odd experience: pissed on tequila, turning round and Fred Durst’s there.” He frowns before returning to a familiar theme. “Two years ago, you know, I was planning on becoming a teacher.”