What started as a secret project has become a global behemoth for the three men behind Magnetic Man. This weekend, Skream, Benga and Artwork will step into the well-travelled live rig for the first Parklife shows, bringing their marathon tour to a head. Before piling onto the long-haul flight down here, Artwork chats to inthemix about the meteoric rise of dubstep and why Prince is their ultimate studio mate.

Are you a bit over the touring?
No, it’s just been really hectic this year. At some point we did eight countries and eight festivals, all in eight days. So it was just mad.

What started the collaboration between yourself, Benga and Skream amidst your individual success?
We wanted to make music that was a little bit different than we were all individually making and we wanted to do it live. These days you can do so much, but we wanted to do something where you could split the tracks up and each person have a different part of the track and do it as a live show; that was the whole sort of thing behind it. We wanted to take it to the States and to festivals as a ‘live act’. It was just an experiment at the start and it kind of worked so we stuck with it.

So how does it actually work on stage? What is each person’s role?
Well, basically there are three computers. Each one of us has a separate part of the music; so someone has the drums, someone will have the bass and someone will have the top lines. They’re all running at the same time so you hear the tracks as they should sound, but then you change different parts: like if you have the drums you can change them for different drums, you can mess up basslines and turn them backwards.

Then, each sound triggers a different visual effect as well at the same time. So there’s a big light show and it all synchs together; it took us a while to get together. You can do anything you want really, it’s pretty mad.