Basement Jaxx: This is the house that Jaxx built

The DJs Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe are now one of the most commercially successful dance acts around. But they've still got underground credibility, says Fiona Sturges. How did they manage that?

I've caught them on a bad day. Reclining in a sweaty rehearsal studio by London Bridge, Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe are itching to get to work. Tomorrow night they're putting on a show at Brixton Academy, their first since in the UK since Glastonbury 2000, and they've barely decided on the set list. Not that they're showing it. They are, after all, a well-brought-up, privately-educated pair who wouldn't dream of making a journalist feel uncomfortable. They offer me a drink, then a chair and ask lots of polite questions. Did I have any trouble getting here? Do I like my work? In short, they are the unlikeliest pair of dance DJs I've ever met.

They work under the moniker Basement Jaxx who, you'll probably be aware by now, have just released their second album Rooty, the follow-up to their massive-selling debut Remedy. Even if you never bought their first record, you'll have heard one or two songs on it – the loved-up, Latin bounce of "Bingo Bango", for example, has accompanied myriad sporting events on the telly. Rooty is another feelgood record, perhaps even more eclectic than its predecessor, that looks set to do pretty much the same. Disco, reggae, electro, ska, garage, flamenco and mariachi are seamlessly thrown together with all manner of samples. Where Remedy cheekily borrowed snippets of Eminem and The Jam, here we have Gary Numan, Earth, Wind and Fire and Hall and Oates.

Where performance is concerned, they don't do things by halves either. Firmly eschewing the studious, heads-down approach to live dance, Basement Jaxx favour a no-expenses-spared, carnival-style hoe-down. The stage is given over to a glittering retinue of Latin dancers in towering, feathered head-dresses and microscopic g-strings. "Well, we'd hate anyone to be bored," offers Buxton, by way of explanation.

The son of a vicar, Buxton grew up in Leicester where he says he was surrounded by music. He sang twice a week in the school choir, and he remembers a lot of Mozart being played at home.

"I never owned any records myself," he recalls. "There was no such thing as pocket money at our house."

He was also forbidden from watching Top Of The Pops. His father felt the sight of Legs & Co would be a corrupting influence on his son. Instead, Buxton's main source of music was John Peel's radio show which, as all aspiring musicians do, he listened to at night when his parents were fast asleep.

When I ask him if he thought his father had been heavy-handed, he says "No, not at all. It wasn't the music on Top Of The Pops that he really objected to, it was all that naked flesh. Now of course my Dad's really pleased and takes the credit for everything. He says 'Well, if you'd watched Top Of The Pops you wouldn't have had anything to react against and you wouldn't be doing what your doing now.' He's been in the local paper talking about what we're doing and he was in the "Red Alert" video."

Buxton's musical career began at Exeter University when he made friends with a fellow student by the name of Thom Yorke. The pair began DJ-ing at parties, though Buxton had to borrow records off friends since he still didn't have any of his own.

Ratcliffe, on the other hand, was buying records from the age of 10. It was around then that he began playing guitar and, throughout his teens, he was in and out of various rock bands. He was born in Holland where his father worked as a chemical engineer, but was sent to boarding school in England when he was eight. At 18 he went to York University to study philosophy but dropped out after a year. He moved into a squat in London, got a job in a Tottenham Court Road hi-fi shop and began experimenting with his own music.

"I had no money at the time but a friend lent me £500 and helped me put out my first white label – it was an early jungle record called "Tic Tac Toe". Then a friend and I made a record under the name of Helicopter and had a club hit with "On Ya Way". With each track, I made a bit more money and bought more equipment." After a year, he applied again to university and got a place at UCL "to finish what I'd started".

Buxton and Ratcliffe first met through mutual friends in 1993 and immediately got talking about their love of house music. By now Buxton was working in a PR office in Westminster and Ratcliffe was back at college. Using Ratcliffe's equipment they would both work on music together in their spare time. They set up the label Atlantic Jaxx on which they released three anonymous EPs.

"We just called them EP1, EP2 and EP3 and they had plain white labels," says Buxton. "We were trying to say it doesn't matter who was making them. The music should speak for itself."

The response was better than they could ever have imagined. Word came back to them that it was being played at parties all over the country, and the Buxton and Ratcliffe started to gather confidence. At the same time they had started a series of club nights in south London, the first at the George IV pub on Brixton Hill and the second at the Junction, where they first road-tested "Red Alert".

The excitement surrounding these nights was enormous, but just as the style magazines got wind of them, they closed them down.

"We didn't want to start attracting a bad crowd," explains Buxton. "Once the magazines start writing about them you know they would have filled up with idiots." Part of their strategy, they admit, was also to hold on to their underground credibility. To stay cool in clubland, everyone's got to love you, but no one can actually know you.

Nowadays, though, there is no denying their commercial status. They are occasionally spotted on the street, but it's their music, they say, that's more instantly identifiable. Are they sick of their own songs yet?

"Funnily enough, no," say Buxton. "I mean, I wouldn't go home and put Remedy on but I saw a bit of football yesterday and as usual they were playing "Bingo Bango" alongside the commentary. I thought how much it suits it – it was very energetic. I felt very proud."

Buxton and Ratcliffe stress that they wouldn't be where they are now without their small army of singers. These include Blue James, whose iron-lunged vocals helped propel "Red Alert" into the top 20 and, Kele Le Roc, star of their latest single "Romeo". "Where's Your Head At?", the most hard-edged of the Rooty tracks, features the Camberwell rapper Damian. The skittering, strung-out "down-di-di-di-di-down" vocals of "I Want U" are credited to Mandy, another Camberwell resident who stopped Buxton on the street one day, and a year later found herself on his record.

Buxton and Ratcliffe still like to disappear underground from time to time. Last year they released The Camberwell EP – a modest collection of hard house tracks – under the pseudonym Banana Kru. Why bother, I ask, when you've got the whole dance world at your feet?

"That's exactly what we want to avoid," says Buxton. "It's nice, every now and then, to be invisible."

'Rooty' is out now on XL Records