Skream arrives at Sheffield's Plug nightclub in a manner more befitting an amateur boxer than a headline DJ. He's flanked by his tour drivers, two bulldog-faced cockneys in their 30s, bellies bulging out of their Fred Perrys, strobes bouncing off their bald heads. They walk through the door like they're entering the ring.

In this room are a few hundred people who've grown up with Skream the same way their dads grew up with Morrissey. They look up at him from under the peaks of their New Eras, gurned-up bottom lips, quivering at the sight of the south London boy wonder responsible for much of their musical upbringing.

Skream – his mum calls him Oliver Jones, his mates call him Olly – arrives at the dressing room. It's locked. He taps a guy in a hi-viz jacket on the shoulder: "Mate can you let us in?" For the next two minutes the four of us stand there in silence, the needle abruptly pulled across the Rocky theme playing in our heads.

Behind his darting eyes, Olly is conflicted. At the start of the year he had four songs on the Radio 1 playlist, a feat that's only been matched by millionaire hit factory David Guetta. Last week he was playing to crowds of 8,000 on a massive US tour. In between he's produced tracks for Katy B and Example, held down radio shows on Rinse FM and Radio 1, and headlined festival stages as part of dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man.

Olly's instinct is to keep things moving. "I'm up at 7am every day, in the studio by 8.30, even if I've only had an hour's sleep," he says. "I'm so fucking rinsed physically right now, but I hate it if I feel like I've wasted my daytime. I never wanna be looked at as lazy. I wanna be available if someone wants to see me."

Despite this tough work ethic, Olly maintains the giddy exuberance of a 16-year-old schoolboy on his first night without a curfew. As fellow Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac says, "Out of all the DJs I know, Skream is the first one up in the morning, but he's also the last to go to bed at night."

From his much-mythologised five days without sleep at Glastonbury, to strings of shows in shonky student unions, he'll get on it every night. History has shown that this combination of fast living and easy highs can create an almost inevitable slide into arseholedom. Yet Olly displays an old-fashioned sense of politeness. He has his lairy moments too, though. They occur mostly late at night, on Facebook, dubstep messageboards, and in interviews. He feels he's in a constant duel with those who think his best years are behind him, who've seen 2011 as dubstep's death knell.

'My musical career is all I can do. I'm not being a junkie, not being one of them guys down the dole office every day'

Magnetic Man. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

"My musical career is all I can do. If this fell through tomorrow, I'd be fucked," he admits. "I'm not being a fucking junkie, not being one of them guys down the dole office every day. I need to be a respectable person, someone who can take his family on holiday. So I sometimes get aggressive and might come across as a cunt because I care about what people think, and I hate the fact that people who listened to me from '02 to '06 now feel that I've lost it."

Making money from music wasn't even the dream for a teenage Olly. He dropped out of school when he was 14. "I slipped and started hanging around with people I shouldn't have been," he recalls. "I've got pretty good social skills; I can turn up in a bar and chat to someone. So for a while I was drinking from 12 in the morning till the next day. I had nothing else to do. Nothing. I'd be drawing weird stick men out of fucking Corn Flakes."

Hanging out in record shops started to change all that. Soon he plucked up the courage to play his productions to DJs, at a time when people weren't interested in playing out that weird bassy sound. "I was making, like, 13 tunes a week," he says. "I was making dubstep but people didn't want it. There weren't even DJ bookings for the kind of thing."

Things turned around when Skream met Benga. The pair would send tunes to each other, feeding off each other's influences and figuring out this new sound. Pirate DJs Hatcha and Artwork (now the third member of Magnetic Man) started to play their productions, and eventually the pair got a show on Rinse FM. "That was the first platform I had to play my music to people all round the world. There were guys from Brazil listening to my show every week; guys from fucking Korea and Indonesia when I was just 17."

In 2005 he dropped Midnight Request Line, a tune which many saw as the embodiment of a new genre which was refusing to be named. By the time his 2009 remix of La Roux's In For The Kill was released, dubstep was in its ascendancy and Skream was credited for it breaking into the mainstream.

But there's mainstream and there's mainstream. Back in 2005, dubstep was the purview of evening radio and excitable Guardian articles. Now it's spread across middle America, selling out cellphone-sponsored arenas. This Atlantic drift has also meant its barmitzvahtisation. A once multi-faceted, subtle sound has had all its hues ramped up to neon. A new generation of stars have emerged who – despite keeping the half-step rhythm – make music that could easily sit between Black Eyed Peas and Hava Nagila.

'I stood there, eye to eye, and watched my son being born. I swear to God, I've never had a feeling like it'

Dubstep massive: the crowd for Skream and Benga at Fabric Photograph: Sarah Ginn

There's a meme going round the dubstep messageboards. "Dubstep, it used to be like this," it says above a picture of about 10 blokes wearing winter coats, staring studiously at another bloke adjusting a mixer, "now it's like this." Underneath, there's a picture of six American teenage girls with their tongues out wearing glowstick glasses, fishnet tights and crop tops with bits cut across the chest to show off their neon bras.

"Internet fucking fiends," Skream complains, falling into a familiar pattern. "They seem to think – this is the most irritating thing, drives me mad – they think that's my new direction." Skream's current single, Anticipate, is a full-on chart-orientated dance track, clearly part of UK bass culture but with only the vaguest connection to dubstep's dark past. "When I sent it to Sam Frank who vocalled it, we was both expecting kids. Bro, it's a celebration of my child; it was never gonna be dark. It's euphoric, cos that's how having my son made me feel."

In July, Skream became Dad to Jesse Jones. The first tunes he played him were not the harrowing frequencies of dubstep but "Bach and shit like that". You sense that if anything's going to stop Olly cremating the candle at both ends it's this new arrival. "Yeah, it's an eye-opener, it shows you what's actually important in your life rather than bullshit. At the moment I'm with him every day. I come back from the studio and I'm with him till he goes to bed."

Skream's Sheffield dressing room is starting to fill up. One of the other DJs is telling a story about giving a 17-year-old girl a blow back outside, and Olly responds with puns so obvious we won't repeat them. Amid the camaraderie, there's a lot of man love. Olly gets pissed off that seminal UK bass DJ Zinc has been given such an early slot, and cheers like a sitcom audience at a special guest when fellow Rinse host Youngsta shows up. This was what dubstep was about, before the Ministry compilations and awkward references by Whitney on EastEnders, just a bunch of lads taking the piss out of each other. In a few moments he'll walk out of our chat and into a crowd of tanked-up uni boys, and girls with glitter cleavage, whose heads will judder in appreciation as he eschews his poppier direction for a set of white-knuckle bass. He'll once again prove himself the party-hard everyman, the boy who took things seriously without ever becoming serious.

But right now he picks up the Guardian's Dictaphone, his harsh south London consonants flecking spittle into the mic, and looks us in the eye. "I'll tell you this, bro, I'm terrified of blood. Terrified. Hence why my teeth are so bad. But that day, I was standing next to my girlfriend and I couldn't stop peeking round. So I said, 'Fuck this', and walked round to the other end. I just stood there, eye to eye, literally, and watched my son being born. I swear to God, I've never had a feeling like it … As scary as it seems, especially for someone who wasn't expecting it … It was amazing."

He puts the Dictaphone down, takes a bottle of beer out the fridge, and opens it with his teeth.

2011 The year dubstep broke

7 JAN: JAMES BLAKE MAKES THE BBC SOUND OF 2011 LIST

"I didn't make this record for Chris Moyles, I'm in the dubstep scene," Blake told the Guardian on the day he found out he'd made No 2 on the Beeb's list. He'd go on to show how far from radio playlist committees he could push the sound.

6 JUN: NERO'S DUBSTEP SYMPHONY

There was something a bit Big Society about this BBC-organised project, which saw the chart-friendly producers team up with some perplexed-looking members of the BBC Philharmonic. We can imagine Gary Barlow carping like a sealion at every violin respite from Nero's Minipops basslines.

7 JUN: SKRILLEX HAS A HIT

First Of The Year (Equinox) has now had 20m YouTube views, despite sounding like it was commissioned by the US military for use in Abu Ghraib. It combines an Olly Murs cod-reggae beat, a woman screaming at you to "call 911", and a noise cannon bassline that could put cracks in your double glazing.

20 AUG: FWD>>'s 10TH BIRTHDAY

No one institution can take greater credit for incubating dubstep's malformed embryo than the basement of London's FWD>>. In August, it celebrated its birthday with a 10-hour night, with one DJ representing each year of dubstep's alchemisation. One regular said it was like their life flashing before their eyes. Ketamine's a hell of a drug.

26 NOV: THE FIRST DUBSTEP MUSIC AWARDS

If a dubstep awards ceremony happens in a warehouse in Birmingham but no actual dubstep DJs show up to it, does it make a sound? Er, yes. But in this case, the sound was of 4,000 glowstick-waving ravers riding around on dodgems to the sounds of wompy wompy bro-step like Flux Pavilion. Same time next year? Probably not.