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

When Juan Atkins is walking through Berlin airport, he’ll often spot someone out of the corner of his eye, approaching cautiously before plucking up the courage to ask: “Are you Juan Atkins?” But what they’re really asking the diminutive 61-year-old is: “Are you the man who created techno?” Atkins, speaking to me from his Detroit home, elaborates: “They’ll tell me, ‘Your music changed my life.’ It makes me want to cry, man.”

Despite being the genre’s ambassador and elder statesman – his first record was released in 1981 – Atkins is not slowing down. He has just got back from playing Berlin’s clubs, recently had a slot at Detroit’s Movement technofest, and this week he will hit the UK’s Houghton festival.

Birmingham reminded me of Detroit. After a party, people would go to – what is it? – the fish’n’chip shop?

Atkins’ first experience of Britain was Birmingham in the late 80s. The city was the home of his manager Neil Rushton, a former Northern Soul DJ who was canny enough to start promoting techno records in the UK. “Birmingham was cool,” says Atkins. “It reminded me of Detroit, kind of industrial – although the nightlife on a weekend was rocking. After the party, people were going to – what is it? – the fish’n’chip shop?”

A few years later Atkins returned, but by then the UK was in the midst of its rave era. “It was a culture shock. America at the time was kind of racially divided – while in the UK, there were 5,000 white kids going crazy to my music.” Atkins had grown up in one of the most turbulent cities in America, one that had erupted in racial violence in the mid 1960s and was still struggling to cope with shifting racial demographics.

But Detroit was also technologically advanced. The motor companies that powered its economy used cutting-edge machines and robots to help build Fords and Chryslers. In the 1970s, the city also boasted a leadership that was almost entirely black: the mayor, the school superintendent and the police chief were black and, crucially, there was a black-owned radio station called WGPR. Atkins was influenced by one of its DJs, the Electrifyin’ Mojo , who would play Prince rarities alongside the B-52’s Rock Lobster. All that created a strange mix of technology, black music and eclecticism that would become the ballast techno was built on.

Atkins would be unceremoniously torn away from Detroit. He moved to the rural Michigan town of Belleville after his parents split up. The transition to Belleville, with its cows, hay bales and annual strawberry festival, was a hard one. “I was against it,” says Atkins, whose new home only had a tiny African American population compared to about 60% in Detroit. “It wasn’t like a racial thing though. I just wasn’t used to going to school on a yellow bus and living on a dirt road.” Atkins may have hated the “country” nature of his new home – he went back to Detroit every weekend and during the summer – but once settled, he met two other black kids, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May. Their musical experiments would become the first wave of Detroit techno.

The trio would discuss the most cutting edge music by Yellow Magic Orchestra, Gary Numan, and their favourite: Kraftwerk. But it was with another collaborator, Rik Davis, a Vietnam veteran with a deep love of the acid rock of Jimi Hendrix, that Atkins would make his first breakthrough, playing as the duo Cybotron. “Jimi Hendrix was like the soundtrack to Vietnam,” says Atkins. “There was something about his music that blended with the Asian jungle. Everything Rik did on the synth was emulating Hendrix to a certain degree.”

Their early records, like Cosmic Cars and Clear, contained echoes of Kraftwerk’s electronica but were tougher and worked brilliantly on the dancefloor. Think of techno today and images of sweating bodies writhing around Berghain might spring to mind, but in the early 1980s Cybotron’s music was being consumed by middle-class black kids – a relatively new phenomenon that Atkins argues was only really possible in Detroit. “Because of the auto industry and the union power, we were making the same amount of money as the white people working in the factory and were kind of elevated to a higher level.”

That new social status and buying power was a big influence on early Detroit techno. Firstly, Atkins’ family could afford the equipment – it was his grandmother who bought him a Korg MS-10 synth. But secondly, the “preppy” black kids of Detroit wanted sophisticated music to dance to. 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. If it sounds like a weird, heady mix, it was meant to. “That was the whole exercise,” says Atkins about his strange bedfellows. “We were doing stuff nobody else had done.”

The pair would eventually split, with Atkins going on to produce groundbreaking records as Model 500. 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.

But while Detroit natives knew exactly where techno came from, that wasn’t always the case with the rest of the world. In 2023, rival claims over techno’s origins came to a head when Frankfurt opened the Museum of Modern Electronic Music, claiming it was the first of its kind – even though Exhibit 3000, a small space in Detroit started by “Mad” Mike Banks of Underground Resistance, had been open since 2002.

For some, this was an act of erasure, but for others a reckoning with the fact that Germany was now the centre of world techno thanks to its club scene. For Atkins, who started going to Berlin in the early 90s, and released an album with German techno ambassador Moritz Von Oswald in 2016, the term “techno” has one clear origin story. “I put it this way,” he says. “I know I’m the first one to apply the word techno to electronic music. I can’t claim to be the inventor or originator of electronic music, but I can definitely say that I got that.”

It isn’t just techno’s origins that have been questioned but also its meaning and purpose. In a scathing essay, the critic Hubert Adjei-Kontoh took aim at the way dance music, including techno, had been co-opted by brands after the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in 2020. “There may be no better illustration of the tendency toward secondhand righteousness than the late canonisation of Detroit techno musicians,” he wrote , arguing that Detroit techno – the creation of middle-class kids – was having an artificial radicalism imposed on it. Does the genre’s originator believe techno is political?

“I don’t necessarily,” says Atkins. “But I make social statements. My lyrics are supposed to make you think about something other than shaking your booty on the dancefloor and falling in love. I feel like artists have an obligation to say something meaningful.” Atkins doesn’t want to spell out what his messages are, but they are there. On Cybotron’s 1983 track Industrial Lies, he seems to be taking aim at both the military-industrial complex and Reagan’s “greed is good” America. “You buy the missile, buy the laser, buy the tank,” he sings. “Evict the widow, put the money in the bank.”

There is another persistent theme. “Space has always excited me,” Atkins says. “What could be out there – and how it may have affected us.” Some people believe aliens had a hand in building the pyramids, but Atkins – whose track No UFOs is one of his signatures – has his own take on extraterrestrial meddling, believing modern technology itself could have been somehow beamed in from another galaxy. “Maybe,” he says, “the whole Earth life experience could be an extension of some alien life somewhere, you know?”

If he’s right, what would that make techno? Alien music from another dimension? Looking at Atkins’ career and its huge influence, maybe that’s just about right.

• Juan Atkins is at Houghton festival , Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 8-11 August