WHEN he's not busy driving his tank around Elephant and Castle, the Aphex Twin might pause to tell you a story about the art of remixing. He was once paid a lot of money by the Lemonheads' record company to remix one of their tracks.

When the record company rep arrived to his studio to pick up the track, the Aphex Twin realised he had completely forgotten about it. He picked up a random track, handed it to the rep and told him it was "very experimental". When the record company played what turned out to be four minutes of random Dutch Gabba music, they were ready to get "very experimental" on the Aphex Twin's limbs.

Another time he remixed a Nine Inch Nails track without even listening to the original. This, though, is possibly the only producer in the world who has remixed both Philip Glass and the Mike Flowers Pops (and most every band in between) to massive acclaim. He can then collect all these greatest remixes on an album and cheekily call it 26 Mixes for Cash.

Somewhere on the album, you'll stumble across a Jesus Jones remix which doesn't appear to have anything to do at all with the original.

The remix is the last resort for a doomed band. If the track isn't "happening", some electronic boffin charges them a small fortune to put a few breakbeats over it. Before you can say "that'll be £25,000, please", the radio programmers who previously dismissed your new single as unlistenable crap are now putting in on heavy rotation because it's suddenly become "bangin'".

You only have to listen to Cornershop's original version of Brimful of Asha to realise what a good remix can do to a pedestrian song. But this is an exception. The remix has now become an excuse not to write what we used to call a B-side. Instead, you get a bunch of lame remixes all hiding their lack of originality behind silly musical titles - "the five-foot-high ambient-dub remix" etc.

Like most things musical, the remix originated in Jamaica, where King Tubby and Lee Perry stripped down original songs and concocted a "version". This was imported onto the New York Hi-Nrg scene in the 1970s, where it became a disco remix - allowing people off their heads on crystal meth to stay on the dancefloor that little bit longer.

The Rolling Stones became the first huge name band to cotton on to the remix trend when their Miss You single came complete with an eight-minute extended dance remix.

Most bands got it wrong, lazily slapping on a few minutes of percussion to pad things out. But acts such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Depeche Mode elevated the remix to as near to an art form as it will ever become.

When Andrew Weatherall arrived in Primal Scream's studio in 1990 and was instructed to do something with the band's motionless I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have song, he blurred the line between re-mix and rewrite. The resultant track was so different to the original that it had to be given a new name: you now know the song as Loaded.

One good remix can can do more than give a band a big hit single - it can totally alter how a band go about making music. For example, Everything But the Girl were a winsome bedsit indie duo who produced a beautifully forlorn acoustic soundtrack for sensitive student types. An Everything But the Girl album used to be viewed as the perfect accompaniment to reading French Symbolist poetry.

Then along came Todd Terry, who remixed Missing and got it onto the dancefloor (and to No 1). The band's sound was radically overhauled and their next few albums were predominantly drum 'n' bass affairs. The hitherto fey duo became so edgy they were invited on to a Massive Attack album.

This week's release of their archly titled album Adapt or Die (Ten Years of Remixes) lets you hear for yourself how the quantum leap was made; and how the remix - in the right hands - can turn around careers.

Adapt or Die is on Virgin