I did the usual fanboy stuff, which he largely ignored. (I quickly learned Detroit producers have a keen aversion to fanboy praise and blowing smoke up the ass.) But when I mentioned I was due to go on a record-hunting trip to Chicago in a few weeks, he gave me his business card and told me to hire a car and visit him in Detroit, where he’d hook me up with some spots to find rare records.

He then rushed off, as he was DJing in one of the intervals. What followed stood out more than the live performances of Inner City or Rhythim Is Rhythim (featuring a young Carl Craig running a drum machine and adding synth textures). May’s DJing style had never been witnessed in the UK before. It was fast. Ridiculously fast. A good 10-15 BPM faster than UK house DJs were playing at that time. The mixing seemed secondary to the impact of attitude. May would keep a mix for only a few beats or a bar or two before slamming in the next track. They were more like edits – akin to a hip-hop turntablist, but with none of the theatrics or scratching. The crowd did not know what to make of it, myself included. May mixed up his own edits of “Nude Photo” and “Wiggin” with test pressings of as-yet-unreleased Transmat releases by Jay Denham and James Pennington, contemporary European rave tracks with early breakbeats, Chicago house and, most interesting to me, tracks by Liaisons Dangereuses.

If the UK crowd didn’t know what to make of May’s high-impact DJing, Carl Craig – on his first UK visit – was getting his own culture shock, courtesy of his UK hosts Mark Moore of S-Express and singer Sarah Gregory. As Craig recently told Skiddle magazine, “The first club that I went to in the UK was actually the night before we did the first set. It totally freaked me out. We had nothing like that in Detroit. It was a party called Kinky Gerlinky. All the men were wearing dresses.”

Mark Moore remembers the night well, and took the opportunity to reminisce recently: “I met Carl when Derrick came over to play as Rhythim Is Rhythim, supporting Inner City at the Town & Country Club. He told me Carl was coming over early and that I should meet him and look after him, so I said I would take him clubbing. I took him to the opening night of Kinky Gerlinky, which is now known as a legendary alternative ‘freaky’ drag night. It was Carl’s first time in London and he was just 19. He hid in one of the corners of the club watching in amazement and partial terror. At the end of the night I asked him what he thought and he said, ‘Oh, man! That was just crazy!’ We became great friends after that.”

Moore had first been introduced to the Detroit techno sound by A&R man Darren Mohammed, who was working at MCA Records at the time: “He was crazy about the Chicago house sound and, via that, the Detroit sound. Also coming were Leslie Lawrence and Kid Batchelor from the band Bang The Party, who had some releases with Neil Rushton’s Kool Kat label. We were all obsessed with all things Chicago and Detroit at this point, and there was a great tightknit scene from 1986 onwards gravitating around Pyramid at Heaven, and then later on in various warehouse parties and, of course, places like Shoom at the Fitness Centre, Southwark Street and RIP at Clink Street.

“Darren has his own group Adrenalin M.O.D., and he said they were getting Derrick May to come to London to work on a track of theirs. That took place at Addis Adaba Studios on the Harrow Road, northwest London – literally five minutes walk away from where I was living… By this time in 1988 I had unexpectedly become a pop star with S-Express. I’d just got back from promoting in Europe and Darren called to say he was coming round from the studio with Derrick. Derrick saw all the records in my living room, littering most of the floor and stacked up in huge piles. He just raced past me and immediately started digging through the records. It was hilarious!

“So me and Derrick hit it off straightaway. He would come and stay at mine when I moved to a larger apartment in Maida Vale, and later he’d bring all the guys round like Juan Atkins, and ask if his mate Kenny Larkin could stay at mine for a while. So, as Derrick says, my home became a London haven for the Detroit guys during these earliest visits.”

I also visited Moore’s Maida Vale apartment during the period, invited along by Matt Cogger, who had returned to the UK after working for Transmat in Detroit for a year. I remember that in just one afternoon there were many industry people coming and going. It really did seem like a hub of a very exciting, tightknit creative scene building a bridge between the UK and the Detroit producers.