Beat dis

On account of its appearance in the title of a song by the Lighthouse Family, Ocean Drive should be a byword for mundanity. Quite the contrary. For the best part of a week, this stretch of road hosts the best parties of the Miami Winter Music Conference. We are in the VIP area on Nikki Beach, clutching mojitos and feeling a little wired.

'Dance music's not dead!' beams Pete Tong. 'Look around you!' At the bar DJ Eric Morillo is ostentatiously buying tequila shots for his wide-eyed coterie. Someone is having gaffer tape wrapped around his head. A girl is wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend 'I fuck for coke'.

'What happened with dance music in the Nineties did make people a little complacent,' continues the Radio 1 DJ. 'It got a bit bloated. But really it was just a case of going back to square one. It's exactly the same now as it was when I started 20 years ago.'

While Radio 1 broadcasts the very best sounds from Miami back to Britain, in a car lot in downtown Miami, the new disco couture is being explored. We're far from four-to-the-floor sunshine house in the Soho Lounge. You'd call it pretentious if you weren't wasted enough to be swept up by it. Geek-spectacled King of Convenience Erlend Oye is dancing to his own simmering house record 'Ghost Trains'. Someone drops the Buzzcocks and then takes you bang into Daft Punk's lost, funk-strewn 'Crescendolls'. LCD and the Rapture tear it up live. Tiga's 'Pleasure from the Bass' whisks you back to one of Laurent Garnier's Balearic blowouts at the mid-Eighties Hacienda. Sure, it's learnt from the past. But that doesn't stop it being the future.