Derrick May isn’t a man with much to say these days. Well, not in public, anyway – although he remains as vocal as ever in private. Several Detroit sources have told Ears To The House that he gets very angry whenever we write about him – with one stating “You guys are his guilty secret. He’s always bitching whenever you and Michael James write about him.”.

So we apologise in advance to the residents of Farmington Hills, as their peaceful Sunday is now likely to be interrupted by another Mayday rant. Recently, May felt the need to come out and say something after weeks of online questions surrounding the origins of techno. Mr C recently parroted the line that Juan Atkins was its originator – and opinion at Ears To The House HQ remains divided on whether he was trolling his audience or is simply an idiot.

In the interests of fairness, here is the full and totally unedited video from the man himself – who’s looking an awful lot more grey recently and still doesn’t seem to have turned the central heating on…

This video manages not to be interesting in what May says – mostly because most of it is nonsense. He repeats the increasingly dismissable lie that Detroit techno was invented by himself, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson – claiming that anyone who states otherwise is racist.

This, of course, is the same line Ben Sims tried recently. It didn’t work then and it isn’t working now – mostly because most of the criticism is coming from fellow Black artists within Detroit who were shut out of “the Belleville Three fairytale”, as Blake Baxter so cuttingly puts it. It’s also the same line he used when he realised he’d been cut out of a BBC Radio 4 documentary on Detroit techno.

Frankly, May’s refusal to engage in any serious debate on the subject demeans him. But what does anyone seriously expect at this point? After all, this is the man who has only given one interview in the past three years. This is the man with nothing to say over multiple allegations of sexual assault from multiple sources. Allegations which he hasn’t even tried to convincingly deny, lest we remind everyone.

Any journalist worthy of being called that would wipe the floor with May. He would crumble over questions about whether he produced anything he claimed he did. He would stumble over his words trying to explain away the numerous allegations against him. Luckily for him, the lack of almost any serious journalists inside the dance music press ensures the myth remains alive – at least for now…