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than a war zone. It was hell.’
    Shortly after, the White Flight began, as respectable middle-class white families packed up and moved to the suburbs, where half the factories had gone anyway.
    In ten years, the population of Detroit halved from two million to one million. Even the Motown record label, which had made Detroit a world capital of music too with its wealth of black artists like Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves, Diana Ross and the Temptations, moved to Los Angeles.
    They weren’t ‘Dancing in the Streets’ any more. Madonna may have been born there but she left, too.
    And that was it. Detroit became a wrecked shell whose population is still falling. There are no jobs downtown today and when Hudson’s, the big department store, closed down, most of the city-centre retailers followed suit and went under too.
    It’s hard for a European to understand this because we have no equivalent, but there is a very real possibility that one day, Detroit will implode: that it will simply cease to exist.
    Already, there are people in the suburbs who are proud to say they haven’t been downtown in twenty years. The nineteen-year-old doorman at our hotel in Dearborn admitted one night he’d
never
been there.
    He simply couldn’t believe it when, every morning, we bundled our kit into the trucks and went off to the centre, even though it was only twelve miles away. He was even more amazed, though, when we actually came back each night.
    He obviously had a word with the manager who, one day, advised us not to go down there any more. When he found that we had to and that we preferred to drive in on Michigan Avenue, rather than down the safer expressway, he rushed off to explain to the girls on the reception desk that our rooms might become available sooner than he’d thought.
    Despite this attitude, the mayor, Dennis Archer, is ebullient, saying that Detroit was only murder capital of the world once and that no one will beat the city in making quality cars. ‘We’ll take on anyone, any time,’ he crows.
    But he’s missing the point because none of the car firms is dependent on Detroit any more. GM has a factory in Mexico for chrissakes. Honda is in Marysville, Ohio. Toyota and BMW have factories in the USA too, but they’re not even in Michigan.
    Sure, Ford, GM and Chrysler – the only remaining US car firms – still build cars on their home turf, but they’re in the leafy suburbs. And when I say leafy, I’m talking equatorial rainforest.
    Should you ever need to go to Detroit, drive west fromthe city centre on Jefferson, past Belle Isle and make sure your windows are up. Crash the red lights too, because to stop here is to invite the unwelcome intrusion of a 9-mm slug.
    And then, at one set of lights, you’ll notice that everything changes. On the east side, the shops are burned out and shabby. Black men shuffle around in the wreckage looking for anything that could be lunch – a bedspring or a butt end, perhaps.
    On the other side of the lights, the fire hydrants are painted Dulux commercial white, the street lamps are mock Tudor and the houses are immaculate and huge. Every fourth car is a police cruiser and every third person is out jogging. Welcome to Grosse Point, a lakeside suburb where the big car-firm bosses live.
    I hated it. This was like something out of
The Stepford Wives
and we’d only been there for five minutes when the cops arrived. They’d had a flood of calls about a group of guys in jeans. Jeans in Grosse Point. You’d get further in a G-string at Henley.
    I swear that before we left we even saw someone cutting his lawn with a pair of nail scissors.
    It’s not quite so bad on the other side of the city, north of Eight Mile Road which is the accepted barrier between rich and poor, black and white, civilisation and a Bronze Age war zone.
    These are just like any American suburbs – until the Friday-night reminder that you’re in The Motor City. Or near it anyway.
    There’s a pretty vibrant