Juan Atkins - the man credited with inventing techno music in the 1980s - is coming to Dublin next weekend. He talks to Richard Brophy.
ROCK music used to have a monopoly on heritage acts, but electronic music, which by definition fixates on the future, is also re-discovering its past. Kraftwerk have performed three times in Ireland in the past four years, Sheffield's synth pop bands The Human League, ABC and Heaven 17 are coming to town, and now Detroit techno pioneer Juan Atkins, aka Model 500, is headlining the DEAF festival in Dublin.
In the 1980s, Atkins worked with Vietnam veteran Richard Davis as Cybotron, using obscure drum machines and synths to create a new music form called techno (the term comes from Cybotron's 1984 release, Techno City). Songs such as Clear, No UFOsand Alleys of Your Mindsounded futuristic, stark and precise, like they were forged in one of the city's abandoned car assembly plants, yet bubbling under the austere surface were familiar sounds and nuances that pre-dated even Detroit's Motown era.
"My father was into jazz, so I got exposed to it," says Atkins. "He bought me my first guitar when I was 10 and I learnt drums, bass and then moved onto keyboards. I have always been an instrumentalist: nowadays there are people making music who can't play an instrument, and the one thing I liked about jazz is that it's all about the instruments."
As he grew up, Atkins listened to funk acts such as Cameo, Parliament and Sly & the Family Stone, whom he tried to emulate when he started making music. "My stuff was all over the place, but then I heard Kraftwerk: their music was so clean, so precise, I was fascinated."
Atkins took Kraftwerk's robotic sensibilities a few steps farther, giving their melancholy electronic pop a metallic sense of rhythm that still sounds futuristic. An avid fan of sci-fi, Atkins insists that he didn't plan to make his music sound like it originated in the outer edges of the solar system.
"I loved Star Warsand I used to read a lot, but I didn't have a blueprint, it just flowed and all the influences came together," he says. "Even the guy who designed the logo for Metroplex (Atkins's label) wasn't given a brief, but he came back with a futuristic design. We were all on the same wavelength in Detroit at the time, it was unique."
Last year, Atkins recruited 'Mad' Mike Banks, the leader of the militant Underground Resistance collective, and new Detroit faces Mark Taylor and DJ Skurge to perform live as Model 500, and the band have played acclaimed "classics" shows all over Europe this year. Does he feel that the shows fulfill his long-stated aim of developing a "black Kraftwerk", a concept that he originally planned for Cybotron - or is he merely tapping into nostalgia for electronic music's past? "When you pay money to see an artist perform, you want to see a real performance," he believes. "You don't want to see them use a laptop. Our show is 100 per cent live and I do all the vocals.
At the same time, we're not really making top 40 hits." Surely Atkins was tempted at some stage to write unit-shifting pop music to finance his groundbreaking work? "No, I only make music because I'm passionate," he answers. "I'd welcome it if one of my records were huge, but I'm not going to make a pop track - that's too easy and easy is no fun. It would be great to have a few castles on a hill somewhere, but I ain't complaining, my life has been easy - it's better than zero."
• Model 500 play The Village in Dublin on Bank Holiday Sunday, October 26th. For more, see http://deafireland.com
