Swedish House Mafia: 'We don't travel on jets every day'

Swedish House Mafia are one of the biggest draws in dance music. Luke Bainbridge met them on tour in Las Vegas

"It's not always like this," Steve Angello smiles, as Swedish House Mafia's private jet starts its descent over the Arizona desert to Las Vegas. "We don't always travel on jets like this to shows. Not every day."

The group are en route from Miami, where last night these self-styled mobsters – Sebastian Ingrosso, Angello and Axwell – played to 10,000 people in their own custom-built venue, the Masquerade Motel. Despite Angello's protestations, this is increasingly what life is like. Last summer, their club night at Pacha in Ibiza was the island's hottest ticket, especially when Kylie Minogue joined them on stage for the launch of her new album. Their two Top 10 hits, the unapologetically commercial house anthems "One" (featuring Pharrell Williams) and "Miami 2 Ibiza" (with Tinie Tempah) were arguably the biggest club tracks of the summer. "We're talking about the biggest dance trio in the world right now," said Radio 1 veteran Pete Tong, introducing their set from dance festival Creamfields.

Their rise to this point is captured in a new documentary film, Take One, hailed by some as dance music's answer to This is Spinal Tap. It's directed by fellow Swede Christian Larson, who followed the group to 253 gigs in 23 countries over the course of two years, a measure of how huge the Mafia have become. It sees the trio embrace the debauchery of the superstar DJ lifestyle with a brio long since deemed uncool in rock circles – spraying champagne on crowds, showing off recently acquired LA mansions and Lamborghinis.

Occasionally they appear self-deprecating, but often simply smug. Axwell seems to ask every female: "Whassup, you wanna party?" Angello has an altercation with Paris Hilton's boyfriend after she interrupts him DJing to request different music. "She was like, 'I'm fucking Paris Hilton, who the fuck are you?'" laughs Angello. "I'm like, 'I'm Steve Angello, don't you know who I am?'… 'But I'm Paris Hilton!' I'm like, 'I don't give a fuck!' He pushed my face, then… he ate my fist!"

Fans will laugh with them, others will laugh at them, but the Mafia are just laughing all the way to the bank.

The three are all superstar DJs in their own right and record under various aliases, each with their own labels (Refune, Size and Axtone, respectively) but as Swedish House Mafia theirs is an almost unrivalled brand in dance music today. This despite the fact that, rather like Daft Punk, who took their name from a sniffy review of their previous band, the moniker began as a joke when the trio joined forces. "Someone online said, 'Who do they think they are, the Swedish house mafia?'" explains manager Amy Thomson.

Childhood friends Ingrosso and Steve Angello Fragogiannis met Axel "Axwell" Hedfors in Stockholm, when they started DJing in a pizzeria ("the most ridiculous place"). Axwell had his first hit with "Feel the Vibe" in 2004, the same year that Angello remixed Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams", and things built steadily until this year they released their first material under the Swedish House Mafia banner.

Given their wont to switch into Swedish to bitch about interlopers in the film, I was unsure what to expect when invited to join them on tour, but the trio seemed indeed like good fellas when we met backstage in Miami.

I'd seen smaller aircraft hangars than the temporary Masquerade Motel. This is how big the Mafia are Stateside, part of the pack surfing the wave of renewed interest in dance music in the US, along with David Guetta (who is French), Tiësto (Dutch) and deadmau5 (Canadian). Until recently, the charts were relatively untroubled by the four-to-the-floor beat, but then came Kanye West sampling Daft Punk, Guetta's smash hits with Black Eyed Peas, Akon and Kelly Rowland, Lady Gaga's house-tinged success and the Swedes' hit with Pharrell Williams.

As Guetta has crossed over to pop, Swedish House Mafia have taken up his position, bridging the gap between the dance community and the mainstream. Ingrosso co-wrote the track "Cupid Boy" on Kylie's recent album, Aphrodite, and Axwell says he is keen to work with Chris Martin, but they insist they're all also keen to keep their left-field guises and release other material on their own labels.

I watch their signature countdown from front of stage, as the curtain goes up and almost every arm in the crowd rises. The sound ebbs and flows, the group pushing buttons to push buttons in the crowd, working to a climax, the three DJs as animated as anyone, bouncing with one arm raised, blasting air horns. The production is huge – 100 pyrotechnic effects, lasers, video walls, projectors and 50kg of confetti. I watch the second half from the back of the stage and it's slightly incongruous without a proper sight of the spectacle to see three such diminutive figures manipulating a crowd so vast. Angello turns to me, eyebrow raised, grinning as if to say: "Are you having this?"

Backstage afterwards they're all smiles and hugs. "No one else can do that in Miami!" buzzes Angello. We head to waiting cars. "Are you hungry? I know the best place in Miami." Ten minutes later, we're sitting by roadside takeout La Sandwichiere. "Get the prosciutto and mozzarella," Angello advises. We talk about Miami, their relentless summer and Sandwichiere's vinaigrette, which Angello can't quite recreate at home, and then we head back to the hotel, where his brother, Antoine, is DJing at an aftershow.

Next morning, Axwell hasn't slept well: "Too many Red Bulls." Antoine only finished partying an hour ago. They're pleased to find today's jet has been upgraded. "Our jets are usually smaller and you can't stand up," says Axwell. "Once, we were right behind the pilot. I could smell his breath. It was not nice."

As we take off, Ingrosso chants the chorus to "Miami 2 Ibiza", changing the lyric to "Vegas". Axwell is pleased they'll have the same jet tomorrow, then realises it's only a 45-minute hop to Los Angeles. It seems a waste of a decent jet to him. "Maybe we could just circle for a while or something?" he half-jokes.

"We do find it weird that so many people want to come and see us play," he continues, discussing the madness of their last 18 months. "It can be overwhelming, because we remember when we used to play to nobody in a pizzeria."

"Exactly," nods Ingrosso.

More cars are waiting on the Vegas tarmac to whisk us straight to the hotel, only pausing to admire a huge billboard advertising tonight's show, a 30ft picture of the group. We're later joined for dinner at Nobu by Tiësto, who played the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles last night then hired his own jet to fly over to see his "brothers". He recalls a debauched post-Creamfields flight to Ibiza when he and the Swedes got a bit carried away with their rider of champagne and Jägermeister. "I was spraying champagne inside the plane," he says, shaking his head. "Even at the cockpit." When they reached Ibiza, the jet was trashed and the DJs had to be poured off the plane.

I watch the gig from Tiësto's box, where the alcohol is flowing freely. The Swedes appear in masks to the warmest welcome any mafia members have received in Vegas for years. They don't finish until the early hours, after which it all gets loose as we move to the club for the aftershow, Vegas being both everything and nothing you want it to be. Dawn has already broken by the time we get to bed. It seems like a cliche, as perhaps with everything with Swedish House Mafia, but it's no less daftly enjoyable for that.

When I wake the Swedes are long gone, already landed in LA.

A deluxe edition of Until One, including the film Take One, is out now on Virgin. Swedish House Mafia have just announced four UK shows for next May