retro-futurist adj.

Singer…Fay Fife, in a Peter Pan tunic, resembles an interplanetary go-go dancer… The rest of the band looks similarly retro-futurist, drawing camp inspirations from both Flash Gordon movies and a mod, ‘swinging London’ look.

It’s my impression that Gilliam was temperamentally more in tune with the retro-futurist nightmare of Brazil and its chaotic pop version of Kafka and Orwell.

Brasilia: Brazil’s Retrofuturist City.

The whole place had been gutted and refurbished, probably several times, since she’d last been here. This time around, it had been done out in the modish retro futurist style, rather like her own office.

The keyword crystallizing everything simultaneously appealing and problematic about the nu-wave explosion is ‘retro-futurist’, that seemingly self-contradictory concept. Producers are reaching back to recover that lost sense of electronic music as bracingly new, startling, alien (as opposed to what electronic sounds had become by the late nineties—an omnipresent but barely noticeable thread in pop’s fabric). That lost futurity is signposted by stiff mechanistic rhythms and synth-sounds that are cold.

Andy Nicholson, the series’ production designer, beams with pride as he describes his reverence for the first film, and his attempt to match its ‘retro-futurist’ look (the way that a late-1970s viewer imagined the future).