If you're going to call it a day, you may as well go out with a bang. That appears to be the reasoning of Swedish House Mafia, the staggeringly successful trio of Swedish superstar DJs who on Saturday brought an end to, at least, their live incarnation by staging a vast farewell extravaganza at Milton Keynes Bowl.

Sebastian Ingrosso, Steve Angello and Axel "Axwell" Hedfors have always had a fairly exalted sense of their own importance. This much was evident in their notorious 2010 fly-on-the-wall documentary Take One, a preposterous but profoundly enjoyable piece of reportage that painted them as essentially an unwitting dance-music take on Spinal Tap.

With typical chutzpah, they billed Saturday as the largest headline DJ show in the world, and while the gaps in the crowd flailing around the Bowl's mudbath hinted it was not a 60,000 sell-out, it was still an impressively large-scale event. Yet it was impossible to comprehend exactly how Swedish House Mafia ever came to attain such stature.

Strangers to nuance and subtlety, their blaring mix of stadium-rave synths, ADD-friendly controlled explosions and juddering breakdowns succeeded only by bludgeoning you into submission. Abetted by admittedly spectacular lasers and pyrotechnics, thumping tracks such as Antidote suggested exactly what would have happened had a tyro Simon Cowell been handed acid house in 1988 and instructed to monetise it.

A long two hours of relentless, sledgehammer beats climaxed with the overwhelmed Ingrosso leaping on to the DJ console, waving an enormous Union Jack and informing a field of mud-caked ravers that they were all "fokken legends". We may never see Swedish House Mafia's like again. That may not be a bad thing.