The Chemical Brothers are releasing a career-spanning hits collection, Singles 93-03, and like kids with something - anything - better to do, they are finding the associated promotional duties every bit as punishing as Friday-afternoon detention. Rowlands and Simons are not the sparkiest of interviewees, and to judge by their meandering sentences and heavily pregnant pauses, they'd both give their crinkled vintage T-shirts not to be here. But the knob-twiddlers are not without enthusiasm. They just channel every ounce of it into what really drives them: making groundbreaking, fired-up anthems. It's a passion that the Southerners Simons and Rowlands have been obsessed with since their Manchester Poly days, when, as students, they were seduced by the acid-house glory days of Manchester's legendary Hacienda club

Simons puts it, there's a fair breadth of music on there. Singles 93-03 starts with the band's first release, the dark adrenalin-fest "Song to the Siren", recorded in Rowlands' student bedroom, and ends with two new recordings - including the psychedelic single "The Golden Path", featuring The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne. In between, it takes in the No 1 hit "Setting Sun" (from Dig Your Own Hole, with Noel Gallagher on vocals) and the intense, pummelling "Hey Boy Hey Girl", from Surrender, as well as hits from last year's Come with Us.