[stimpee]

“It’s about community. Some of our colleagues, who are former rough sleepers, said: just stop and talk,” he says. “So we asked: do you know who that is? That’s Sandra and that’s Kevin – and did you know Kevin used to be a bank manager and Sandra had children who were taken off her? And the number of people who get in touch and say: ‘That could have been me.’”

Hyde thinks stories of community organising should be on the news, “but what we get instead is that we’d better be really scared and blame Them. Who’s Them? Anybody but me. My father reads a particular paper that fills him with a particular opinion.”

Is it the Daily Mail?

“Hmm.”

(It is clearly the Mail.)

“He used to buy it and I’d say: ‘Don’t leave it for my kids to see, please.’ I’d rather he left porn.”

But you two came through the rave scene, I say, with all its legends of football hooligans setting aside their blood feuds and getting on one: didn’t that movement promise we would all come together?

“These people didn’t beat each other up and girls weren’t getting hit on and the cultural differences went out of the window,” concedes Hyde.

But those were also days of poverty. “I remember that feeling of being one pay cheque away from homelessness,” Smith says. “Wanting to look after my family, desperately needing to earn money.” They would borrow £600 to print up some records that Smith would stick in the back of his mother-in-law’s Ford Fiesta and try to flog to record shops in Soho.

Decades later, they have done everything: played up mountains and in castles, jammed for 15 hours straight in a field at Glastonbury, scored films and gold discs. They have two children each. Smith is about to enter his seventh decade, while Hyde turned 62 a few days ago. “We were in the Yorkshire Dales at the weekend, doing the Three Peaks Challenge, and as I was coming down the second hill I felt something go and said: ‘I won’t do the third, thank you very much.’”

Over Underworld’s 40 years together, the music industry has gone from vinyl to MP3, from labels sustaining a wide range of artists by means of intricate cross-subsidy to billions for the likes of Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift and pennies for the rest. It is a place that has less space and attention, even for bands of Underworld’s stature. Where do they see themselves in today’s industry? “In this pig shed, under a beautiful sky,” says Hyde. They are constructing an alternative with their collaborators: Malcolm the studio boss, Mike the manager and Robin the publicist.

Then Alecsandra, the Guardian’s photographer, starts taking pictures – and these thoughtful, self-questioning men suddenly turn into the band. Firing up his giant mixing desk, Smith begins improvising a version of Soniamode, hitting buttons marked Zombie Economics, Zombie Government and Addictive Drums. Bouncing around, Hyde puts on a falsetto: “Drop the kick drum, Rick, you’re so great!”

Smith obliges, to acclaim from helium Hyde: “He really is the god of techno! He walks among us.”

Then Smith starts looping my words over the Underworld classic Cowgirl, which suddenly I remember playing on my broken Sony midi hi-fi. “Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy,” sings Hyde absent-mindedly, as if down the local where an old favourite has just come on. How does he feel when he performs this now? A big grin. “Very often, I feel grateful still to be alive.”

Soniamode (Aditya Game Version) by Underworld is released on 21 May. It can be streamed on various platforms here. Underworld play Wembley Arena, London, on 7 December