“Well that, it kind of catches me between a rock and a hard place. Because whilst I’m completely committed to helping people, and to the efforts that they make for what they believe in, I’m an advocate for the future. It’s something that has, and always will be, central to what I represent as an artist, and to stand in the way of the future would make me a hypocrite.”

When Plastic Soup catches up with Derrick May, he’s in a Split Hotel room looking out at the Mediterranean, describing to us a beautiful scene that has given him a day or so to catch his breath on a ridiculously busy schedule. For the past thirty years the man has been at the forefront of the avant-garde of electronic music, famously ‘innovating’ the techno blueprint as part of the Belleville Three in the mid to late eighties and consistently creating new and exciting music since. And he isn’t about to fade away silently into the background just yet either.

Derrick’s comments come about when we probe him on the digital debate, asking to see if he intends to follow Carl Craig and push Transmat into the digital age. As can be expected of an artist who has witnessed the development of vinyl as a medium right from its infancy as a DJ led product in the late seventies, his feeling for the product isn’t completely removed from Nostalgia. Citing the work of old friend JP at London based store Vinyl Junkies, he’s in awe with what him and his peers have been doing with vinyl, using it still to push great music to people worldwide. But there remains that role of ‘advocate for the future’, an appointed position of ensuring that we move forward constantly. It’s something the ‘Innovator’ simply can’t forget his responsibility on.

It’s a role he still sits comfortably with; charging forward with his blueprint of the way music and creativity should be linked. Asked about how creativity is faring in the world today, particularly in America where the writers strike is focusing the attention on the arts industry, he doesn’t pull any punches, citing the current state as an ‘all time low’. His own projects remain shrouded in a constant air of mystery, a Hi-Tek soul mix compilation he is creating for Ministry of Sound is definitely imminent, and his plans for what to do with Transmat remains, as detailed before, mooted in debate, with him opting, he mentions with a laugh, to ‘meet the digital world halfway’. Talk of film work revels in this subterfuge...

“Right now I’m involved in a very exciting project, something that will certainly grab your attention, but I’m not at liberty to discuss what it is. It’s not that I don’t want too, I just can’t mention much more than its work for a film, and an exciting and big one at that. Hopefully we will be here again, having this conversation in eighteen months, and I can tell you more. But it’s something I’m pleased to be working with. I’ve just done some recent work for a ‘remake’, and I call it a remake and not a remix, because all I really did was working it around the chord line, of a piece of music from Japanese anime film Tekkon Kinkreet by Plaid. So I have a passion for working with music and cinema.”

Other aspects are less coyly placed to stand on his ire, with his candid outspokenness easily drawn on a number of issues. Whilst the technological advancements were always a central tenet of the Techno manifesto, it’s clear that some people are abusing the developments. Like many in his position, Derrick doesn’t like the way that the certain things are making it easier for ‘artists’ to cut corners (“I genuinely look forward to the day when Promoters stop booking DJs and artists who are prepared to perform on Autopilot”) and he’s by no means enamoured with the political status of his nation as it stands.

Describing George Bush as the ‘prototype of the ultimate fascist’, a conviction he assures us has been one held long before the rest of the world caught up to his actions, he’s convinced that America will pay for the way it has treated the rest of the world with its radical contradictory Christian extension of fascism. Sadly, he sighs that it’ll be the little men rather than Bush and his cronies who suffer with the latter benefitting from the safety of an ivory tower. When we suggest that perhaps he has a responsibility of representing America as a creative artist, he shrugs the idea off, saying that most people don’t even know where he’s from until he opens his mouth.

“Being Black, and being American, and travelling is still something that people just don’t expect in Europe. It’s not popular for black Americans to travel the world. Most black Americans don’t get to Europe and not many people have got accustomed to this yet. But this could be said for Americans as a whole, there is a statistic that suggests that only 3% of the nation possess passports. So the people coming over are repeat travellers, who regularly take holidays and regularly view the world.”

Talk then falls to Chibuku Shake Shake, where Derrick is once again playing for the club as they celebrate their birthday, this time appearing alongside a bevy of fellow Americans (Fellow Detroit techno legends Underground Resistance and long time partner in crime and ‘Cosmic Twin’ Francois Kevorkian). We ask if the presence of so many of his countrymen besides him delivers a sense of nationalistic pride, but it seems that borders and walls don’t fall as part of May’s basis of acknowledgement.

“I don’t fall in line with the whole patriot thing, so I don’t view that line-up and see people from my own nation, all I see is that I’m performing with my contemporaries. If you are doing something creative, I respect you whether you are from America or Uganda. I’m always excited to be appearing amongst my contemporaries, it’s always something that gives me great satisfaction. But either way, I will always give you my best; I will always give you excellence, whether my contemporaries are beside me or not. I don’t deliver halves.”

It’s a statement that his career certainly wouldn’t revoke, as Derrick continues to move forward and excite the establishment. Sadly it seems he retains a worrying level of fear that as the world progresses, it doesn’t seem charged to take things forward as creatively as he likes:

“I have an interesting analogy on the whole situation which I will share with you now. Before there was Cars, people used a buggy and a horse, and they would place all their trust with that horse. They would look after that horse, feed it, wash it, keep it dry and the horse would always deliver if it could, and you always knew what you were getting because of that bond between man and animal.

But then came cars and the situation changed somewhat, now you would have to place your trust not in a living being, but in someone else who had told you it would work, another man. But still, you had to look after the car, you had to clean it, you had to keep it running smoothly and make sure that it was working. You still had a level of control and responsibility in taking that technology and making sure it delivered, and you always could make it personal to you.

But now, as we move forward even more, there remains less responsibility, less focus from us as individuals, and less personality. I’m worried that technology will fall into the wrong hands, and if that happens, you change everything for ever, you damage things beyond what we could conceive. We will lose an art form for ever, and consequently it’ll put a lot of people out of work too.

I feel this has already started to happen, and it’s already had an impact on our creativity. Things have gotten to the point where people have forgotten how to take a pen to the paper, they’ve forgotten about what being creative is.”

Derrick May plays at Chibuku presents... The Birthday on Saturday March 15th 2008 at Nation, Liverpool.