Hard floors, harsh sounds and the northern anti-festival: Futurama 1979-1983

This article explores the history and context of the post-punk festival Futurama, inaugurated in 1979 within the cavernous, makeshift and disintegrating venue of Leeds Queens Hall, and running on an annual basis for five years. As a musical statement Futurama gathered the provincial post-punk micro-scenes that were congealing in many cities in the North and beyond, building upon a vaguely coherent common strand of moving beyond punk, by adding a sense of industrial angst and futuristic ambiguity. Futurama went against the grain. Large festivals emerging from the hippie and rock scenes had settled with events such as Glastonbury and Reading and catered for audiences within those scenes; however both punk/post-punk and the North became excluded from this culture. The article then documents the immediate post-punk environment as it grew in the (post-)industrial North through the lens of Futurama’s, with an emphasis on the problematic status of Leeds as a city trying to assert its own post-punk identity. The time of Futurama is then looked back on in both a hauntological context and a discussion of place (and buildings within place). The locations of the events and their staging as a kind of inversion of the open space and fresh-air ideology of festivals is considered within a framework of architectural other-directedness.