Fantazia (rave music promoter)
[[1]]Fantazia is a UK based dance organisation. The company was founded in 1991 and grew from the expansion of Acid House from a London phenomenom to the UK wide underground, but legal, movement of licensed raves. They hosted a series of huge raves throughout 1991/92. This included 6 sell out one off raves in 1992 alone. A feat never beaten. Included in these amazing events were Fantazia Summertime, Bournemouth, with 16,000 in attendenance. Featuring DJ acts from the time like, Ellis Dee, Slipmatt, Ratpack & Top Buzz. The event featuring on the ITN News at 10 and the after party took over Bournemouth beach.
![[1]](http://www.fantazia.org.uk/images/911231%20NY91%20Flyer%201.jpg){kind=link}
Following on from this was the UKs largest ever single area event at Castle Donington race track. Over 25,000 people, was an awesome feat. Massive firework display, Stage dressed as a castle, over 60 DJs & PAs plus a massive inflatable dragon that inflated in the middle of the night.
Other massive events included, The Showcase, Second Sight, New Year 91, New Year 92, tours of The Hacienda, Barrowlands and also The Big Bang at the SECC, Glasgow in 1993. This was at 12,000 the largest ever indoor rave.
Fantazia were exceptional also at the time because they commercially filmed all their major events and released videos. These heavily charted reaching no 2 in the charts (beaten only by Take That). This footage can still be seen on the companies website and is available to license, an amazing time capsule of an era that shaped many people. Fantazia flyer and tapes from the time are also were highly collectable and event now are very sort after.
The company moved away from raves around 1993/4 as the licensing regulations were tightened to make it difficult to stage the sort of one off events the company favoured. Instead the company expanded the record company that had been founded to release the ground breaking Old Skool compilation The First Taste. From this grew the massively succesful series The House Collection/Club Classics. These featured pretty girls on the cover and were mixed by top House DJs. Regularly selling over 100k records the company sold many millions of records.
in 1997 the company held Fantaza The Return of a Legend, at the G-mex in Manchester, once again this broke records. 12,000 people made this the largest ever indoor House music event.
The company still exists to this day and has a massive web site dedicated to their past activities as well as the whole rave and dance scene. In 2006 they will a 6000 old skool event in Glasgow, with another to follow in September.