Although I'd been to America a few times before, this was my first experience of the Motor City. It quickly became obvious to the director Ben Whalley and me, that Detroit really would be the star of this documentary. It may be overshadowed by its more affluent neighbour Chicago but Detroit has produced its own unique brand of revolutionary music, from Motown to garage rock. It was also the centre of the biggest race riot in history when the city burnt for five days in 1967.

When we first arrived in Detroit last year, I was shocked at the scale of poverty and deprivation. Last year the city's biggest company General Motors reported a staggering 90% drop in profits. It shows. Filming among the factory ruins we saw people scavenging for scrap metal, and like many in the city, they are grasping for survival. As John Sinclair, political activist and manager of the band MC5, told us, "It's like New Orleans after the flood, except there was no natural disaster. It just got washed over by America."

Yet Detroit in the 1950s and 60s was a hard-working town. "Cold", "flat" and "tough" are just a few adjectives people use to describe the Motor City. Being cold may seem inconsequential, but as Motown founder Berry Gordy said recently, the fact that people have to fight their way out of the snow makes them more ambitious. Factory work was gruelling and labour leader General Baker told us how Joe L Carter's song, Please Mr Foreman I Don't Mind Working But I Do Mind Dying expressed the workers' resistance. Listening to music in the city's thriving clubs and bars became a way of escaping the soul-numbing work of the factories.

Berry Gordy was a factory worker who built his music empire in the Hitsville building on West Grand Boulevard. Now the Motown Museum, we met Martha Reeves in its tiny studio. There was barely enough room for our crew, yet Martha remembered how artists would squeeze into the studio to create music out of nothing, banging chains and stomping their feet on the dirt floor.

The worldwide success of Motown may have marked the end of race music but the city still remained divided. After the riots in 1967, white flight began to the suburbs, leaving the black population behind. Today Detroit is 80% African-American and the number of people living there has halved in size. However, in the late 60s the inner-city became a place of urban adventure for a growing white bohemian crowd. The venue where they all met to "freak out" was the Grande Ballroom.

Today the Grande has been abandoned and left to rot. John Sinclair, equipped with a hard hat, was still determined to venture inside and show us around. Forty years ago, at the height of America's anti-Vietnam movement, John saw his band, MC5 scream their iconic song Kick Out The Jams, which seemed to express the rage of his generation. Iggy Pop stage dived for the first time, a decade before punk. Standing amid its crumbling shell, Sinclair was overcome by emotion, perhaps by the memory of a bygone era when it seemed rock 'n' roll might redeem Detroit.

Emily Jeal, Researcher