Over the past year or so, the three members of the so-called Belleville Three have been trying to claim they started techno. Derrick May spent many years telling the world this message – it’s amazing how you can fool people when the words are being spoken by a fairly charismatic person – but after multiple allegations of sexual abuse were made against him, fellow members Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins had to do some of the leg work.

The job is made easier by useful idiots who are happy to do their bidding. One of those is Mr C – a man who occasionally posts on social media on the subject whenever trying to curry favour with other artists who give his events some international clout.

Nonetheless, there’s a big problem – neither Saunderson nor Atkins are particularly good communicators. Whilst May gave the message with a combination of charm and conviction, his two colleagues possess neither quality. When their story is now being scrutinised like never before, it all adds up to an uphill struggle.

And to make the job of keeping the myth alive even more difficult, it doesn’t help that the men have previously contradicted themselves. When Juan Atkins was interviewed by Wired Magazine in 1994 and asked about the origins of techno, he said this…

“Today, I think techno is a term to describe and introduce all kinds of electronic music. In fact, there were a lot of electronic musicians around when Cybotron started, and I think maybe half of them referred to their music as techno. However, the public really wasn’t ready for it until about ’85 or ’86. It just so happened that Detroit was there when people really got into it.”

This sounds suspiciously like an admission from Juan Atkins that techno did not start in Detroit, despite what Juan Atkins is now trying to tell us. Let’s see how they explain this one…