It must be strange to be Derrick May, the man who, along with schoolmates Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, started the thing we call techno. Who is still treated with reverence for his intensely spiritual DJing and for some of the most important records ever made. Who sits silent in his Detroit warehouse, releasing nothing, appalled by the drug culture that envelopes the music he created. Derrick May knows the secret of techno, but will he share it? Writer: Tony Marcus
Photographer: Peter Gabriel
Who knows the secret of techno? Derrick May, the man who, with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, started the whole damn thing does. And it’s a lot more to do with what’s going on in his head than computer love and the soul of the machine.
DERRICK May lives in a small warehouse building that covers an entire street corner in one of Detroit’s dead zones. There’s nowhere to go if you take a walk outside but the apartment’s windows run right around the curved street and through them you can see a church, a discount clothes store and a billboard poster of Kate Moss advertising milk. By night they show four lanes of traffic streaking past in a red blur, the nearby steeple glowing with an underwater green.
Inside his space is one large room with a kitchen area, tiny annex with a bed and clothes, large TV, video and games machine in one corner, decks in another, a few pictures propped on easels against a wall (including two Dali lithographs and a painting by US surrealist Richard Williams that cost $100,000) and a handful of keyboards that Carl Craig is helping Derrick wire together. When he’s finished it will be the first time in two and a half years that Derrick’s studio has been functional. A PlayStation basketball game is running on the box. Derrick’s customised one of the players so his name is Mayday. “See Mayday on the court,” he beams, “look at the score man. It’s not even a game anymore. It’s like an ass-whipping. I’ll let the computer finish it.”
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