Mazierska/Sounds Northern, 6. Hard Floors, Harsh Sounds and the Northern Anti-Festival: Futurama 1979-1983

In 1979 the Leeds based music promoter John Keenan announced Futurama: The World’s First Science Fiction Music Festival. This event would take place in Keenan’s home city, at the disintegrating Leeds Queens Hall. The venue switched to general entertainment in 1961, following a minimal makeover from its original purpose as a transport depot. It retained a cold and unwelcoming atmosphere, etching its character of bleakness into local folklore. Queens Hall witnessed Christmas indoor fun fairs in the 1960s, northern soul all-nighters in the 1970s, and large gigs in the 1980s. As a musical statement Futurama gathered the post-punk micro-scenes that were congealing in many cities in the north and beyond. These scenes built upon a vaguely coherent common strand of moving beyond punk, by adding a sense of industrial angst and futuristic ambiguity. It was a festival without an equal at the time, as large festivals emerging from the hippie and rock scenes, documented in McKay (2015) and Clarke (1982), had settled with