For some reason, which Ears To The House will probably never fully understand, a lot of DJs like turning their birthdays into a public event. They usually do it by holding a party – something which is cute when it’s a child celebrating the day with some cake and perhaps a bouncy castle, but not so cute when it comes to overgrown men who should know better.

It’s with this in mind that we noticed Juan Atkins celebrated his birthday over the weekend. On Saturday, Atkins had no less than 61 candles to blow out on his birthday cake – and just like a few of his DJ friends, he couldn’t resist but have a party.

So it was off to the Insane Who Sane party at New York’s HoloBar he went – but how did things go? Well, as it happens, one of our regular Detroit sources was at the party, and they were more than happy to tell us their thoughts. How’d it go?

“It was a pretty good night. I’ve seen the venue busier than this, but it was good. Juan Atkins played an okay set and managed not to mess up many of his transitions. I don’t think that you’re ever going to get a seamless, smooth set from him, it just doesn’t seem to be his style. All in all, he’s had worse days.”

Not exactly a glowing endorsement – and on another tip, another Detroit source got in touch over the weekend to inform us about how he recently overheard Juan Atkins publicly referring to himself as “the originator of techno” in a conversation. As they put it, “he now seems to believe his own bull****.”

And yet in 1994, 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.”

Bit of a discrepancy there…