You can’t say there isn’t originality in records that have been made from other records.

There have been tons of sweet records made and I have some of them in my record box. I play records with samples in all the time. Hey, I’m down with playing some sampled shit. I love it. But for me, I just can’t sit down and hear somebody else’s shit on top of mine.

So it’s about authorship.

Exactly. In the long haul, I don’t want to be known for sampling other people’s music to make mine. I’m glad talking to you guys is working out, because I’m glad I cleared that up about the sample. I had made that clear before. I don’t know what you read, but I definitely did not sample.

It was just my assumption.

I have proof. I have the disc and I have young people like Carl Craig who were watching me fool around, not when it was made but he saw the process.

Fair enough. What about jazz? Where does jazz fit in?

It doesn’t. I didn’t like jazz until five years ago. I didn’t even listen to it. I discovered Miles Davis and all these people all at the same time.

What about the methodology of it: the improvisation, the soloist...

I haven’t heard much of that in music these days. I heard a lot of that when we first started. I think I’m a subconscious throwback. I think I stopped making music because the pure mentality, the pure element of it was leaving. Not from me, but from everybody else. I felt like when house music came out and I saw those guys get ripped off... When I saw all the house guys lose it, when I saw Marshall Jefferson get caught up and not get his publishing, when I saw all these guys get destroyed, their careers go down the toilet, the talent involved with Chicago, I thought, “This is fucked up.” Then I saw them coming after us. We got the reputation that we’re not easy to work with.

That’s because you had seen the mistakes everyone had made in Chicago and you got your shit tight.

Right, but the people here [in the UK] wanted to say we won’t play ball, that we’re not agreeable people. I got known as an asshole in the industry. Guys like Pete Tong didn’t care for me back in the day because I wasn’t a rollover artist.

What was your inspiration for putting out your own records? Over here we had punk, but how did Juan go about getting it together?

Juan just decided there was no company, in America especially, and we couldn’t see beyond America. He just thought that there was no company in this country that’s going to put this music out from a young black artist. All we could do was imagine it coming out on a major label. We didn’t know there was any other process. There was only one independent company we had heard about. It was called Nettwerk and it was in Canada. We thought they might be interested. We sent them some music and never heard from them.

They were putting out industrial records, weren’t they?

Yeah, we thought maybe they’d like it. We sent Mute some stuff but nobody called us back. So we did it on our own. Juan basically thought if he didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get out.

By necessity.

Right. Juan bought the book This Business Called Music, so we all bought a copy and learned the business. We followed Juan’s lead. He made a lot of mistakes. I helped him shift and deliver records. That’s the way I learned. I picked up where he left off. Transmat is still going to this day.

Your music is so intimately connected with Detroit. How did it feel to see it selling mostly in Europe?

It made me angry and pissed off. When we put out our first records, we sold thousands in the States. We sold tons of records to Chicago and tons in Detroit. I know we did. Our record “Nude Photo” was on the radio – regular FM daytime radio. Go to Chicago, if the Hot Mix 5 played your record, you sold thousands. Period. Now nobody even knows of the Hot Mix 5 in Chicago. House music doesn’t sell. BMX and GCI play nothing but hip-hop and contemporary music all day long. It’s like it never happened. The only one from the Hot Mix 5 that’s still going is Bad Boy Bill, because he was really young at the time.

Do you think one of the reasons that radio stations didn’t like it is because it’s the first black musical form in America that kind of broke with black tradition? If you listen to house, you can hear the clear parallels with disco, and you can take that lineage right back to Louis Armstrong. But with techno, although it was clearly influenced by some black elements, it also was very European as far as the music industry was concerned.

It’s not black as far as the music business is concerned. “It won’t last, it’s just a phenomenon, it’s just a thing, don’t worry, it’ll go away. I don’t think we should waste any time on this. Let’s monitor it and watch what happens.” I think it just got to the point where they realized it was not going away and they would pick it up on the second wave, which is what they did. They got Moby and all those guys, which turned out to be a real disappointment. Moby did have the most successful album to date with compilations – the only time ever in history there’s been an album that had every single song licensed for compilations. That’s in the record books. I don’t know if that’s by coincidence or what. I don’t know how many of those compilations were from the record company that he released his album through.

Are you finally getting the respect in your own country? You have a million people coming to your festival.

Yeah. That’s a good thing. I had a real fight with the festival. I didn’t want to do it in the beginning. It was Carl’s festival. It was an idea I had, Carl made it a reality.

How important has the UK been to you?

Tony Wilson made a comment years ago at the New Music Seminar when he brought his group Happy Mondays with him. I was on the panel with Marshall Jefferson and a couple of other guys. It was full. He said that without England this music never would have happened. I remember that Marshall stood up and got offended by that. And people started booing. To a degree, he was right. But he was wrong in the context he put it in, with these Happy Monday idiots sitting there and some comedian guy named Keith Allen.

He’s a fucking idiot! He was on the panel too and he was being rude and really trying to start a fight. So I sat up and told him, “You’re a fucking asshole, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” So he tried to have me thrown off the panel because the crowd went crazy when I called him an asshole. It was horrible, for him. He was completely embarrassed.

I believe that without England this music would not have happened, to a degree. I believe that it had to have a diving board and the diving board was Detroit. The pool that it dived into would be England, then into Europe and into Asia.

Definitely Britain first?

Through pop culture. Britain is the home of pop culture – the cesspool of that shit.

Did seeing the way the music was received [in Britain] change the way you did things?

It gave it market value. It gave the music and us market value, which changed the way we saw the music and what we saw the music was worth. It also changed my perception of what I thought a record deal was. When I dealt with record companies and I was told that they were gonna release this many singles and then they didn’t, I took it personally, which was wrong. I just didn’t understand the business. The man didn’t lie to me, his plans changed because they had a hit record.

We were just really disappointed when we found out that people make promises in this business and plans simply change. It was me being hopelessly romantic about the whole thing in the beginning that hurt my feelings. I took this business personally. Big mistake. I look back at articles I did where I say I was hurt because of the music business. Well yeah, of course I was hurt, because I came into it wide-eyed and...

Legless?

Completely. Thinking it was just a place where people put out good music and everything’s great.

Has techno reached a plateau or is what’s happening now under the name a disappointment?

Yes, the last couple of records from Mike Banks and Rolando have been unique compared to a lot of stuff that’s happened in the last couple of years in Detroit. Other than that, Matthew Dear has done some decent records, but he’s not really trying to do anything like what we did. I like his stuff, I can’t say it’s phenomenal, but it’s good. What Richie Hawtin does now doesn’t move me at all. No offense to Richie – he’s a friend – but I just do not feel motivated... I don’t even have a Richie Hawtin record in my bag. I don’t think I’ve had a Richie Hawtin record in my bag in ten years. There’s nothing innovative, refreshing or vibrant about it that makes me believe it’s moving to the next level.

I think Carl Craig right now is beyond Detroit. He really shouldn’t even try to associate with Detroit. He should just concentrate on Carl Craig because he’s moved on. He’s a phenomenal person and a great artist. He needs to get the recognition deserved of someone of his quality. I think he will get that respect, but most of the music from Detroit right now is really redundant.

I think the Detroit guys are living off a legacy that is not going to protect them very soon. That’s my opinion. They’ve been set up with a great legacy and all they gotta do is kick some ass. I could be very wrong. But in my record bag, right at this very minute, I only have about five Detroit records. Really.