Retro Future Festival is a celebration of all things Retro Electro, Synthwave and 80’s - From the music, movies, gaming, neon, lights & lasers. We like to book artists from across the globe to give our fans the chance to see their favourite acts live on stage. There’s also console retro gaming, fantastic merchandise and giveaways, live entertainment, movie and music cos-players and more! Retro Fut
ure Festival - The Story So Far
Like the huge vibrant disco parties in the 80s and the gigs/tours of some of the most fantastic artists in the era, the message of Retro Future Festival is one of absolute radness and feel good energies, bringing people together to experience the joys of being taken away to a different dimension or a place in the past that is synth/retro-wave music. As Wang Chung once sang, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight!”.
2016 - Inception
Retro Future Festival is currently the UK’s longest continuously running specialist Retro Futurism & synth music festival. This idea was created in late 2016 when two small independent business owners from the south-west of the UK (Cheltenham) came together to discuss putting on an event to showcase the Cyberpunk Dystopian 80s inspired concept trailer for 'Retro Grade Future'. On the date of inception Winter 2016, Final Film and Beholderwear promotions met in the Frog and Fiddle Bar and Venue in Cheltenham for a few solid brewskis to discuss ideas for the event, bringing their combined love of 80s culture and science fiction into the future, using their expertise and pushing the boat out to make the event the best it could be for our friends and fans of the scene in general, and quite to the surprise of everyone involved, it took off like a rocket! And the term 'Retro Future Festival' was coined.
2017 - From Dreams To Reality
We decided to settle in London for our first event and since then RFF has taken a nomadic journey through the south of the UK, putting on events in different areas of England's capital as well as Cheltenham and even franchising to Malmo in Sweden! Retro future festival has also sponsored smaller events in London and Bristol working with collaborators to spread our message far and wide. But for a handful of Shire Folk, putting on thefirst event in London right at the heat of summer wasn't an easy task. The more and more we looked into booking venues & artists in a large city the bigger the costs became and the amount of investment we had at the time wouldn't be enough for us to organise the event. This was a huge learning curve for the team which leads to our first Crowd Fund on Kick Starter which succeeded at 3.6K of investment, thus securing deposits on all of our acts and the venue at Styx in Tottenham! Retro Future Festival was now live and after a few months of extra planning the event turned out to be a success. After experiencing the buzz of what it was like to put on the first event, the absolutely amazing feedback we had from the crowd and the artists and the drive to keep the dream alive, we decided promptly to get rid of the post-event blues and plan our next event for Winter of 2017, bringing some of the artists from (what was soon to be) the annual summer event! Neon Winter was born and took place on December 15th hosted at two venues (The Frog and Fiddle and The 2 Pigs) in our humble home town and again also returned huge positive feedback from the attendees and artists involved allowing us to continue our journey and grow as a community even until this day.
2018 - The Year That Rocked
Fast forward to February 2018, after setting our sights higher and landing on 229 the venue for our second year in London, we knew we needed to step up our game, thus organising 'Back to the 80s' which was a Retro Future Festival club night at Thirteen Degrees in Cheltenham to fund-raise for our festive summer show. BTT80s took place over two floors and was our first event to incorporate retro gaming, bringing that aspect of our ethos into the events. The event again got a lot of good publicity and had a great turn out which allowed us (along with more investment from interested parties ) to secure Retro Future Festival II for later in the year. Roll on summer 2018, the hottest day of the year in a massive (for us) multi-roomed venue in Central London After months of planning and promotion we were back for our second event and the biggest one to date at the time. With even more Retro gaming, Face painting, Merchandise and more Synthwave than you can shake a stick at RFF 2018 turned out to be a massive hit, doubling the capacity of the first year's event and allowing us to work with more artists from overseas and growing our following even more. It was at the festival we were approached by Witch and the Wolf who were happy to get involved and organise an autumnal event for retro future fest which was named 'The Aftermath'. Witch and the Wolf - an arts and entertainment company in Bristol - then took us to New Cross Inn, London for our next smaller event which took place on the 5th of September, with dedicated teamwork and a great location the event went super well and kept the Retro Future Train rolling. Around the same time, RFF received a message that would eventually take them overseas which made everyone at Retro Future HQ very excited. We were approached by a promotions company in Malmo, Sweden to franchise the festival for springtime 2019. From what started as a handful of people was now turning into a venture into Europe. RFF was expanding and we were loving it. Roll on 2019!
2019 - Tough Times At The Office
This year turned out to be a turbulent time for Retro future festival with the excitement of promoting a big event overseas and searching for a venue to start planning our Summer UK event in London. Four months into the year we find ourselves at Heathrow airport, London, flying to the beautiful city of Malmo, After a night in the hotel, it was time to get ourselves awake and down to Kulturbolaget which was a fantastic venue (in the past hosting bands like Muse, The White stripes, The Kyle Gass Band and more). The guys on the ground in Sweden organising the event were awesome and pulled off a fantastically epic estival. Retro Future Festival Summer 2019 in the UK was a different story. We found a Gem of a Venue in a fantastic location (Waterloo, London) that had just come under new management and was going through immediate renovations. Unfortunately for us, the turnaround of staff at the venue was high and this lead to poor management of our event from the venue itself, thus incurring extra hidden fees (leaving us at a huge loss) and not allowing us to set that standard we would like at any of our events. This aside we continued to plan an epic event bigger than anything we pulled off before flying artists in from all over to smash it live on stage for everyone who attended. Despite the stresses of organising this event we had a wicked time and really enjoyed ourselves!
