There was a rave at the Sydney Opera House on Tuesday night.

Never mind the recent spate of electronic acts to grace the SOH Concert Hall, Four Tet, Disclosure and Oneohtrix Point Never among them. I’d wager that none shattered these historical walls quite like Underworld, the inimitable UK duo. This was a spectacular, subversive overload of the sensorium, made all the more so by the notion of having a rager where concert pianists and opera divas alike might have stood only hours or days earlier.

If the warm drones of opener ‘Mmm…Skyscraper I Love You’ raised us to suspension “30,000 feet above the Earth”, the driving groove of ‘Juanita’ soon shook off the notion this was to be anything but a Tuesday dance party. Within moments of that warm drone filling the concert space, the crowd had risen as one, swept into the bubbling build of euphoria that Underworld have perfected over 30-odd years.

There’s much to justify the ‘timeless’ descriptor they’re often afforded – the bouncy bassline and swelling synths of ‘Jumbo’, for example, which pre-date the Kompakt-inspired rise of moody tech house. Or in the turn-of-the-century-house-cum-trance of ‘Two Months Off’, blissfully crooned by the sprightly Karl Hyde, a captive crowd responding to his observational warehouse poetry with essential jerks.

What’s most remarkable isn’t just that Underworld remain enduringly popular; a sold-out performance is testament enough to that. It’s in the versatile approach of their enduring marriage of new-wave romantic to the blare of the big room. Though there was little to separate much of it from previously recorded versions, the very essence of their music was straddled with the universal concept of emotion. ‘Born Slippy’, their “parting gift”, in all its heady bombast and hedonistic elation, exemplified this idea of familiar emotion; showered as we were in uniform light and dumb smiles to ear.

It’s as much in their eye and ear for spectacle. It’s in Hyde’s frisky swing of the hips and urban turn of phrase; he who provided the humanising touchstone with characteristic urban mantras that, Trainspotting and lager lager lagers aside, shaped a generation from Manchester to Glastonbury and Sydney.

The Opera House show saw Underworld’s devoted dangling in a state of glorious suspension, softly pummelled by the sinister, frenzied boilover of ‘Moaner’ and anthemic melody of ‘King Of Snake’, punctuated by the impressively relentless crash of strobes and light work. Such was the euphoria of the communal smile that, even in their subtler moments, we revelled in dance.

Underworld played the Sydney Opera House on Tuesday April 11. Photo by Ashley Mar.

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