There are nights in your raving career when you know that life could not be better. The company, music, location, circumstances: everything is perfect. Plans have come together so inexplicably well that the night has surpassed ‘successful’ and hit ‘sublime’. Go ahead, hang your party boots up. You’ve won raving. You’ll probably never have a night as good as this again.

Such is the case one balmy July night this summer at an illegal rave in the Welsh countryside. It’s a little after midnight when I have this epiphany, and I’m certain my dancefloor neighbours are experiencing similar thoughts. It’s a small but turbo-charged gathering; there’s no more than 100 of the rave’s 200(ish)-strong crowd in the old barn but every single person is categorically having the loveliest time. They’re whooping, hollering, cheering, screaming. And there’s a fair bit of pointing and WTFing going on, too.

Understandably: the man who’s just stepped up to the controls is rave royalty Phil Hartnoll, half of Orbital, one of the longest standing and most influential acts in dance music history. He might not be wearing his signature spotlight spectacles, but the wild spark in his eye makes up for it. He’s playing an all-Orbital set, and he’s clearly having just as much fun as the bunch in front of him. He drops ‘Halcyon And On And On’ while grinning, clapping back, cheering us on. He switches in the skipping breakbeats and cascading riff of ‘Impact’. Spirits rocket through the barn’s sheet metal roof.

Whoops become hollers, cheers become screams. Strangers share glances and shit-eating grins. High fives are popping off everywhere. We are having a serious fucking moment right here. Life genuinely couldn’t be better. Or weirder; this is Phil’s only weekend off, and here he is rinsing a rig in a laser-lit barn to a crowd a fraction of the size he usually performs to… and it’s all because of my silly idea: let’s take Orbital to a 2018-style illegal rave.