Most of the people I ranted at the night after seeing DJ Shadow treated me much like a simpleton describing some imagined alien abduction.

No matter how faithfully I described the spinning baseball being whacked out of the stadium… Simon Cowell’s head being hacked off with a chainsaw… The intergalactic space war breaking out while the best bass in the universe united everyone in one throbbing mass… the most I got was an indulgent thumbs-up and a 'sounds great, love!'

Anyone I addressed seemed to put my overwrought description down to too many hallucinogens. And/or the fact that I don’t get out much. But now is my chance to say: it happened, man.

Shadow, aka Californian turntable master Joshua Davis, seems to have taken a bit of a battering from the critics and even fans in the last few years while I have been out of the loop.

He’s been slated for not living up to Endtroducing, his pioneering 1996 hip-hop debut patched together totally from samples. That and for being a bit tetchy about being asked about it endlessly and mouthing off about people nicking music off the internet.

Having missed the decade or so in between his first and his latest album 'The Less You Know The Better', and not even being confident about how to slot it into any particular genre, I can however categorically tell you that Shadow is still a hive of creativity at the top of his game.

He ambled on to stage (after buzzing sets by Knock and Tiger Medoza) with a big smile and humbly promised to show us something old and something new the best he could.

Not a grouch in sight, just a bloke who clearly knew he had something amazing up his sleeve.

Then, to my initial confusion, he disappeared behind a human-size bubble. No mere stage prop, this spherical canvas was The Shadowsphere, which was used to project the eye-popping light show that really did happen!

The screen was pumped full of eye-popping Banksy-esque animations that swerved the crowd into a different dimension.

I reckon that even in a silent room on my own, this spectacle alone would have been, hands-down, one of the best things I’ve ever seen. With DJ Shadow ripping up multiple sets of decks inside the Shadowsphere, it bordered on an epiphany.

There was a collective gulp from the crowd as Shadow cracked open some old favourites. The stomach-lurching familiarity of 'Organ Donor' was one of the first. We couldn’t believe our luck as so many more old classics were spliced and diced – 'Stem', 'Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt', and more waves of sonic nostalgia. Glorious passages of old-school hip-hop sounded better than ever with flawless scratching, built up with booming bass.

These were mixed up with some uncharted territory including 'Border Crossing' and 'I Gotta Rokk' where the bass was laced with heavy-metal riffs and layered guitar licks for an intoxicating cocktail.

The mashed vocals of 'Six Days' and new 'Scale It Back' hovered above the drumbeat to create a dreamy feel.

There were also titbits of dubstep breaks stirred in, but these were just a passing mention, almost done ironically.

The overriding flavour, of the set was big, old-style drum and bass. And it was joyful to behold, as if the last tedious decade of dance fads and charts had melted away (Surely everyone’s natural frequency, really, is drum and bass? Or is that just me?).

Judging by the pleasure on people’s faces – whether they were fresh-faced students, die-hard ravers and even (or perhaps especially) grumpy single-mothers like me - he was preaching to the converted.

Don’t believe any hype about DJ Shadow, and don’t believe the trolls.

You can only judge someone for their last performance and by that measure, the man is a 24-carat legend.

I would probably chop off my right arm to see him again, even if I was stone-cold sober.