Print your favourite rave flyer onto a canvas

Rave flyers have long been considered an artform and they really are a classic image from the age of raves.  Well now Fantazia are able to really turn your favourite rave flyer into a piece of artwork by having them printed on to canvas or as a poster.

Buy your favourite flyer on canvas now

Prices start from £17.99 including delivery via courier.

I have had a great one done of the Fantazia Story so Far book cover and it looks amazing.   This image is available if you to would like a copy as are the Fantazia logos.  Just ask and we will see what we can do for you!

Rave Books have you read any of these?

Befitting of a scene that had as much of an impact and was as loved as the rave one was many books have been written about what has become the Second Summer of Love. We have added a page to the Fantazia site which details many of these books and you can read that below:

Read Rave Book listing now

I have yet to located copies of all the books yet as a number of them are out of print.  I can however personally recommend:  Altered States, King of Clubs and Energy Flash as great reads.

The Rave Flyer Wall....classic

I had one. Did you? Flyer walls were widespread and a much loved thing with hundreds of thousands all over the country from aspiring pre teenages, teenagers and older.

Each week you would go to you local record shop and collect the new flyers. Some times they were rashioned to stop you taking loads and after reading them for the latest new attraction, 100k rigs etc and new DJ name which would evoke images of drug taking and happy people (Ellis Dee - Vibe etc) you would carefully add the flyer to your flyer wall. This flyer wall would grow like some colourful mould taking over first one wall then another and if you were really dedicated eventually the ceiling.

The one showing is of Wesley Cole Alcorn's. If you have a flyer wall picture do email it to us: fantaziamusic@gmail.com as we would love to use it.

Is this the most Glowing flyer ever?

We have just released the flyer for our next big event Fantazia The Ultimate UV Glow Show. And what a stunner this flyer is. Once again featuring the gorgeous Fantazia girls but this time with what must be the most glowing flyer effect of all time, surely....?

Click the title to view the full flyer

Talking of rave magazines,,,

Talking of rave magazines by 1992 rave had gone from a niche movement, acid house, to the main stream. More than 500,000 people were regularly going to raves throughout the country, people were very passionate about it as well and that dedication spawned quite a large number of magazines like Eternity, Blaze, M8 etc many of which ran for a long time. Eventually as the scene declined this either closed or transformed into House music mags, like M8.

These magazines are a great resource for ensuring that rave music and the scene was/has not been forgotten

Rave Magazine covers

We have started adding scans of our large rave magazine collection to the flyer archive. We know they aren't rave flyers but they were a great part of the scene and worthy collectors item. The likes of Eternity, Dream, To the Core and more carried many articles and event reviews.

Whats the most expensive flyer?

Well we don't know for sure so if you do then we would like to hear your suggestions for the award. However we know of one collector who says a Fantazia at the Hacienda flyer can sell for inexcess of £50.

Now that is a rare flyer as it was for a promotional night aimed at other dance promoters from 1992, another very rare Fantazia flyer is the Prodigy gig at the Barrowlands again in 1992. Others to watch out for are our Aussie gigs ones.

If you are lucky to find any of these you have hit the jackpot. Of course many of the Fantazia ones are highly prized and sell well, but many were made in large numbers so can normally be found for between £5 - £15

F is of course for Fantazia

Part of the initial appeal apart from putting on massive night reliably with awesome music was the imagery that we used. Featuring computer generated graphics on an A4 sheet of quality paper the flyers were very striking, collectable and visually instantly recognisable as Fantazia. Starting from 1991 until we rebranded with the Big Bang event in 1993 we used mainly these images. They are still some of the most collectable rave flyers there are from the period. Click the title link to view more images

After moving more towards the house music end of dance we adopt the use of pictures of scantily clad arresting looking ladies on the front of our flyers / albums. This continues to this day.

Which do you prefer?

Massive range now for sale

We have still got to add some of our flyer collect. Well in fact half of our collection. This is turning out to be a long slow job. But if a job is worth doing, its worth doing comprehensively.

Good news is that we have now put for sale all the rave flyers we have in stock that we have currently listed. We mainly only have 1 copy of each flyer so once they are gone they are gone.

Prices vary depending on how nice, what company, the condition and rarity and age. However its not hard and fast so some are almost certainly to cheap and other fairly expensive, but that just the way it goes.

We are thinking of offering special rave flyer starter packs which a collection of small, large flyers. Useful to get any collection going.

Only S & Q to go

We only have a few more flyers left to add from our collection of scanned rave flyers. After this we will be taking a breather as this has been a mammouth task. We will come back to adding more later in the year or as people send them to us.

We will for a while be concentrating on making the flyer library more useful by linking the flyers with reviews of the actual events where we have them and also to sites where you can buy the mix CDs if you want to.

The Flyer library expands

The Fantazia flyer library has finally started to get a decent amount of flyer on it. We have now finished upload many of the ones we already have scanned and you can now view over a thousand flyer images by clicking the title above.

We hope you enjoy the efforts we have gone to. Its the first time there is a comprehensive amount of backs as well as fronts on the internet.

We have a lot of work still to go and be assured we will be giving this some priority in the coming months until its finished.

Why did flyers get smaller?

I made an earlier post about size o flyers in the early 90's getting bigger and bigger. But what is obvious is that after a certain period the began to get smaller again. Now I am sure their was an element of cost saving on the printing involved but that doesn't fully explain things. The reality was that it was very expensive to transport and hand out large flyers. New methods were evolving to reach clubbers. Companies like Out of Hand were formed who gave out flyer bags containing many rave companies flyers and other stuff all at the same time. This was cheaper and easier for them and also for the promoter. The limitation was the size of the bag, this was normally less than A5 in size.

I like the flyer bags when I get them as they contain so much however they do lack that feel and I do miss the large ones that would look great on your wall, these little ones just dont compare for that.

Do Women get offended by the imagery?

Along with a lot of the fashion, music, leisure industy we use pictures of sexy ladies in skimpy tight clothing to advertise our events and products. This start for Fantazia with the House Collection and House Collection Club Classics albums where each featured a girls posing or dancing on the cover, the series was a massive hit and we have continued using the same imagery for events as well since then. This includes the massive series of sellout events in Scotland as well.

Now clearly the albums sold and the event flyers attracted people (at least the men). But do women find this a turn off?

I think not, half the audience are female and half of them are dressed in a similiar way. Now maybe a squarer section of the society would disaprove, but they are most likely the ones that would not attend in anycase and we don't miss them.

What do you think?

Slow progress!

Its a mammouth task scanning a listing all our flyer in the library. We are working hard on it though and we expect to be able to list a massive amount of new ones soon! So look out for them

So who designed flyers from the hardcore/rave days?

Fantazia had their own in house designer back in 1992 who did many of their classic flyers, Obsession similarly used some one they new and who was local to their home town of Cheltenham. Many of the other rave companies like Helterskelter, World Dance, Dreamscape, Raindance and more used either Junior Tomlin or Pez. If you click their names you can read interviews and profiles on both of them. Well worth checking out for a bit of scene history.

Current hardcore rave flyer designs

There is definitely a certain style to the present day rave/hardcore flyers. In 1992 Fantazia lead the way with computer generated graphics, like this one from the Second Sight. These days the look of hardcore flyers is very different.

The likes of Hardcore Heaven, HTID etc use a new style, bigger bolder text, with photos from the events. They seem very busy and the front image is either not prominent or secondary to the logo lettering. Things should change though and I like the look. If we still did the same old imagery it would be a back step and very unimaginative. Fantazia use a seperate style, similiar to the past but instead with the trademark (from the album series) girl picture. These are not stock shots either, but from photos shoots expensively styled and shot, which is why they don't look tacky like some other imitators who attempt to use the same format.

So whats different with the Rave Flyer Library?

We are putting lots of effort into the rave flyer library. It takes an ages to scan every flyer both front and back and internal pages as well. So whats the difference between our archive and other sites? Well we are making an effort to scan the flyers in a higher resolution than most sites have used (now that the internet is much faster, we think you deserve to get flyers of a resolution that can be printed. You can also read all the text on each flyer. Plus a smaller image pops up to see if this is the flyer you are looking for before having to open the main flyer.

But the biggest change is that we have also included the backs of the flyers, which most sites have not taken the efort to include. This means you can now read the details of who was on the line up, where the venues was etc etc.

We hope to also link the flyers to any reviews etc we have from the night. Lots more work to go but we hope you like what we have done.

Y is for Yikes

Yikes held rave style events from around 1992 one of their first being at the Rivermead Center in Reading. They were more drum n bass/jungle than classic hardcore with the pa at this one being 2 Bad Mice and DJs along the lines of JJ Frost, Randal etc. The image shown is from a party from New Year 92 that they did in conjunction with Kaos at the Academy in Brixton. Its our favourite of the flyers we have so far found.

Rave flyers now for sale

You can now buy many of the rave flyers we have in the archive as we have them on sale. Price and conditions of each flyer do vary and we hope to have bundles of flyers for sale soon for those who want a cheaper way to get their collection started. If you have any questions about the flyers do get in touch.

All will be sent in board backed envelopes for their protection.

Which brings us on to, if you have a collection of flyers and would like an offer, let me know and we will see if we can come to a deal. Send us any email to sales@fantazia.org.uk

Z is for Zest

Zest is for Zest at Venue 44 in Mansfield. Though why do so many flyers not have the year on!!!! We dont know to much about this night, so if you can help with the years, or reviews do get in touch.

We have just completed another big upload and loads more flyers are now in the archive.