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Techno godfather Juan Atkins: ‘There were 5,000 white kids going crazy to my music’

How did a kid from rural Michigan – who lived among cows, haybales and strawberry festivals – change the face of music? As Atkins blazes into the UK, he relives his wild times at early British raves

Footage from the era shows girls with perfectly coiffed hair, leopard print leotards and gold earrings dancing with guys sporting flat-tops, chromatic shirts and oversized sunglasses, as Cybotron’s glacially cool Clear – later sampled by Missy Elliott – booms out of the soundsystem. Suddenly Atkins had found success: the group’s early releases sold in their thousands and he set up his own Metroplex label, creating music that married his love of technology with the futuristic musings of Alvin Toffler and that Hendrix-inflected synth from Davis. From Cybotron’s experiments in the early 1980s, the sound of techno grew to become a global phenomenon pushed by a second wave of Detroit artists who took it in new directions: the austere precision of Jeff Mills, the spirituality of Robert Hood, the post-industrial toughness of Underground Resistance, and the Black Atlantic worlds of Drexciya.

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