Roundhouse, London
It is hard to think of two producers currently more likely to provoke purists to feather-spitting rage than David Guetta and Calvin Harris, who have distilled dance music into a clash of Eurohouse beats and R&B melodies. They've produced 26 British Top 10 singles between them, creating a template that detractors claim puts dumbed-down euphoria ahead of imagination.
But for every critic, there are dozens of believers. When support act Harris revs up his laptop, there are still 100 people queueing outside, and those inside are untroubled by the idea that jiggling to We Found Love (the Rihanna collaboration that sold 6m copies worldwide last year) might result in social ostracism. Some fans are so young they probably can't remember that Harris started out as a frontman, singing his own songs; now his shows are strictly DJ sets, with Harris a gangly Scottish octopus who edits, mixes and scratches, all at the same time. It's not subtle, but it gets the job done.
Unlikely superstar Guetta offers little more in the way of nuance, but trumps Harris anyway, by virtue of age and Frenchness. His 20 years of DJing have persuaded the 44-year-old that he's a rock star, and there's rarely a dull moment: he peels off his leather jacket to flex well-turned biceps, mouths the words to songs, makes mystical hand-shapes – all this, and Paris-accented commentary, too. (He hopes we like his new single, She Wolf, implores us to shout "Hell, yeah!" and so on.)
The crowd respond accordingly, thrusting arms skyward as he flicks a switch and allows hits such as Titanium and Sweat to play in full. His mixing skills are saved for mashing together lesser-known tracks, keeping the party rumbling on. Haters may hate, but Guetta is nothing if not entertaining.
