Born Lenny Hilton McGurr, he first picked up a spray can in 1970, aged 15. An only child from a lower-middle class Manhattan home, graffiti provided him with "a solution to my identity crisis" -- a crisis brought on by the news he was adopted.

2000 in 2001 -- The artist at rest

"My mother, who was black, just came out with it one day," he says. "She said you must never tell your father [a white Irish Catholic]. That evening I became Futura 2000: Futura being a typeface, also a [Ford] car, coupled with Stanley Kubrick's '2001 A Space Odyssey,' a really powerful movie for me. I would have been Futura 2001, but I thought everybody would say, 'Oh, like the movie,' so I just took 2000. It was 30 years away, I never thought I'd live to see it anyway."

Numbers were big back then, with most graffiti writers incorporating them in their tags, often to match the streets they lived on. Futura spent a couple of years harmlessly "motion tagging" subways (inside as opposed to on the outside of trains), and occasionally spraying up buildings in the Queens and Bronx areas of New York.

"No one knew what was happening," he says of graffiti's nascent years. "It was just young guys using the New York City subway system at our own discretion. We were our own audience and we spoke to each other through letters. For a decade New York was like the Wild West, it was just open season for public scrawling."

Futura 2000-designed goods sell fast at his RECON store in Harajuku.

During this initial kick Futura met Hugo Martinez, the founder of the legendary United Graffiti Artists (UGA). "More as fan of the stable of artists he represented, painters such as Flint 707, Riff 170, Topcat 126, Stay High 149 and Phase II, who I knew by sight," he says. "I remember being a little 'toy' [an amateur, a nobody] graffiti writer hanging out on the subway platform and trying to get close to these guys."

The UGA exhibition at the Razor Gallery in Soho in 1973 gave graffiti its first serious media coverage via an article in the New York Magazine. Futura quit the scene shortly afterward when what was supposed to be his "masterpiece" ended in tragedy.

Armed with a bag containing over 50 cans of spray paint, he and a friend planned to do pieces on all six trains that were parked in a tunnel below Broadway. "Suddenly there was this enormous flash and the next thing I saw was a ball of fire that had engulfed my friend," he says. The friend was hospitalized and needed extensive skin grafts ("His face was like a pizza bubble, like a cheese bubble, dude; it was f**king hardcore"), but Futura escaped unhurt, physically at least. Mentally, he was shattered by an event that led him to conclude he was a "failure" as a graffiti artist.

He joined the U.S. Navy ("just as the Vietnam War was winding down") and spent four years in service, something that has left an indelible mark on his psyche. "After the military, I can deal with anything," he says.

In 1978 he headed home to New York only to discover he didn't have one. After his adoptive mother died in 1975, his adoptive father had a mental break-down and trashed "anything that meant anything to me from childhood." The apartment was sold, "everything wiped out." His father eventually died in 1982, and Futura has never found out who his real parents were.

After a year in Savannah, Ga. ("working at a radio station, driving a truck, shrimping"), Futura felt he "had to get back to New York," to where he belonged. He took a cheap apartment and was quickly introduced to a slew of contemporary graffiti artists, names such as Zephyr, Dondi, Daze, Haze and Crash.

"Soon as they met me it was like, 'Oh my God, Futura, what's up, you're like the old writer,' " he says. "I'm thinking these guys remember me? The name just appealed to people and my signature was unique. Graffiti is all about a logo, a tag and an identity you create around that.

"I went back down to the subways and I was shocked," he says. "The whole wagons, the whole cars were painted. In '73, style hadn't developed; by '79, it was art. Kids knew how to paint. It was dimensions, shadows."

With Zephyr, who became one of the kings of the subway, Futura created a vehicle for writers to pursue careers as professional artists. At Esses Studios (named after Sam Esses, a N.Y. businessman and art collector who paid the studio's rent) graffiti artists from all over the city explored their art in a new context. "I saw every graffiti writer who was anyone there," says Futura. "The energy of these guys and all the style I saw really got me off. I got inspired to do some trains."

What he did to those trains was radically different to anything else around; no letters or specific graphics -- just colors and shapes. Norman Mailer took note in his book "The Faith of Graffiti" (aka "Watching My Name Go By"). He was labeled "the Watteau of the spray can" and "a space-age Kandinsky" by art critics fast becoming hip to the scene. "I was like, 'Who the f**k is Kandinsky,' " he says.

Commercially, Futura's career really started to take off after an exhibition in 1980 by Graffiti Art Success (GAS). Futura supplied just one piece, on plywood. "Sure enough, downtown Manhattanites, those on the fringes of the art crowd, Mudd Club regulars, New Wavers, gravitated to this," says Futura. A cover story in the Village Voice compounded his stardom.

Over the next five years, before the bubble burst, his work was exhibited alongside artists such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf in New York's New Museum and other upmarket SoHo galleries. From there the street art culture/graffiti movement took off worldwide. Futura found himself hanging out at fancy dinner parties, a regular at Andy Warhol's Factory, shown at the Tate and doing ad campaigns for the Parisian Metro system.

"I just got carried along on that wave," says Futura. "It was not a place I chose to really be. I just got swept up in it. It was a joke really because these weren't really subway guys. Keith's work was original, but I found it amazing how people gravitated to his stuff, it was so corny. He was really setting himself up to be the Andy of his time. He was very clever about promotion."

Futura was not planning ahead, just "living moment to moment." He had no smart answers for the people who asked "How did you develop your style." "It was an accident," he'd say. "I started doing something and I'm like 'Oh, that looks cool,' and it took off from there," he says. That's pretty much how he still works today. He says he gets lost when he tries to plan things out.

"I didn't really belong in that world," he says. "If I'd tried to stick around I maybe would have killed myself the same way as Basquiat did. You have to be fake, play the fake game. In the end I was kind of relieved to get out of that scene; saddened and broke but relieved."

With a wife and two young children to support, Futura worked in the post office, drove a cab, passed the exams to become a cop, before eventually finding his calling as a cycle courier.

"I know my city. I'm military trained, I was just super-efficient. I'd work super early, super late. Through sheer labor and dedication I became the slickest. That was where I made my mark," he says. It also left a strawberry-size burn mark on his right temple, a result of getting caught between a bus and a taxi.

As fate would have it, it was at the first International Bicycle Messenger competition in Berlin in 1992 that he first met Mo' Wax's James Lavelle.