Clean Bandit: We were told to stop making pop music

. There’s no Pink Floyd without David Gilmour’s sweeping guitar lines. Remove Dr Dre's incendiary production, and NWA are just another rap posse.

Billie Eilish’s vocal delivery is so distinctive she can switch genres without losing her essence. For Clean Bandit, their signature sound is a simple, but effective, mixture of chamber music and dance beats. It’s a formula they came up with at university.

Cellist Grace Chatto was dating architecture student Jack Patterson, who started splicing samples of her string quartet into his instrumentals. It wasn’t exactly a new idea. In 1986, Walter Murphy turned Beethoven's Symphony No.

5 into a thumping disco track; and in 1995, Madonna's producer William Orbit made an album, Pieces In A Modern Style, that took Ravel, Vivaldi and Handel to an all-night rave. But Clean Bandit weren’t interested in remixes. They wrote big pop hits like Solo and Rockabye, using their classical chops to give the songs emotional heft.

“It’s a delicate balance,” says Patterson. “If you added a sax solo, for example, it’d be one element too far. You might as well put on a waistcoat and go home.

” But when it works, it works. Clean Bandit’s trademark sound earned them four UK number one singles, two Ivor Novello songwriting awards and a Grammy. Then, with grim inevitability, their record label told them to ditch it.

“There was a push for us to stop having strings in our music,” grimaces Chatto. “We were told to stop making pop musi.