Belleville Three
| The Belleville Three | |
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| Background information | |
| Origin | Belleville, Michigan |
| Genres | Detroit Techno |
| Labels | Blue Raincoat Music |
| Website | thebellevillethree |
| Members |
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The Belleville Three are Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, three Detroit-based musicians credited with inventing the musical style known as Detroit techno. May famously described the Detroit sound he helped create as being "like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator."
Kevin Saunderson was born in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of nine he moved to Michigan, where he attended Belleville High School in Belleville, a town some 30 miles from Detroit. In school he befriended Derrick May and Juan Atkins, both of whom had been born in Detroit but later moved to rural Belleville. The three were among the few black students in their high school.
The location of Belleville was key to the formation of the Belleville Three as musicians. Because the town was still “pretty racial at the time,” according to Saunderson, “we three kind of gelled right away.” The rural setting also afforded a different setting in which to experience the music. “We perceived the music differently than you would if you encountered it in dance clubs. We'd sit back with the lights off and listen to records by Bootsy and Yellow Magic Orchestra. We never took it as just entertainment, we took it as a serious philosophy,” recalls May. Belleville was located near several automobile factories, which provided well-paying jobs to a racially integrated workforce. “Everybody was equal,” Atkins explained in an interview. “So what happened is that you’ve got this environment with kids that come up somewhat snobby, ‘cos hey, their parents are making money working at Ford or GM or Chrysler, been elevated to a foreman, maybe even a white-collar job.” European acts like Kraftwerk were popular among middle-class black youth.
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