Starting your own festival is a daunting task at any age, but for most 24-year-olds, it should be thinkable. Luca Lewis, however, is a different breed: this month saw him launch Adriatic Sound Festival, an expansive, two-stage layout hosted in a private aerodrome in Fano—a town in the province of Pesaro, on the east coast of Italy.
Just nine months elapsed between a spontaneous ‘What if?’ hypothetical between friends and the festival opening, but somehow he was able to ride the wave and pull it off. Once we got chatting to him, and heard his story, it starts to make sense. Spending his teens and early 20s as a professional footballer, first for Italian club Torino FC followed by a stint at the New York Red Bull side, honed a healthy appetite for competition. With keen instincts and a lifelong ambitious streak driving him to start thinking about his own ventures, gradually, his interest in the game began to wane and he moved back to Italy to recalibrate and consider his next moves.
This year was the first edition of Adriatic Sound, and he started big. What was initially supposed to be a (relatively) modest 5,000-head event, quickly ballooned to a festival with nearly 20,000 attendees. Lewis and his team took over a whole aerodrome—which, he tells Complex, had room for many more guests—where they hosted sets from the top table of dance music. Franky Wah was the first to sign on and Lewis credits him as a catalyst for the festival’s success. Also on the bill were Rüfüs Du Sol, Sven Väth, Armand Van Helden, Green Velvet, Mason Collective, Solardo, and a host of local talent.
Next year promises even more, he says. More mini-events, more guests, more acts, and more excitement (early bird tickets are already on-sale). In the meantime, the dust almost settled, we caught up with the baller-turned-promoter to take stock of his impressive feat.
COMPLEX: First off, starting a festival is a daunting task and I honestly would have no idea where to start. How did you come to start your own festival?
Luca Lewis: Maybe it’s easier if I give a little background of myself…
Okay, let’s do it.
My dad’s from New York and my mom’s from Pesaro, Italy, which is next to Fano. I was born in New York, but we moved to Italy in 2001 about a month after I was born. Then, unfortunately, a few months later, 9/11 happened. So my family decided to stay in Italy for a few years. A few years became 10 years and then we moved to New York for my dad’s job. I always played football my whole life and when I was 16, I moved back to Italy by myself to play professional football in Torino. That’s where I started my career.
I grew up fast because I left home quite young. It’s the footballer experience, let’s say. I really love music, and I have a lot of fun in that. In 2020, I was still in Torino and I was going to sign a renewal, but then COVID hit, so I went back to America on the last flight out of Italy. I ended up being stuck in New York for seven months and I couldn’t play, so I terminated my contract with Torino and signed for Red Bull, which is an MLS club in New York. I got my own apartment and the lifestyle got to me. I was 19 at the time, so it was a little overwhelming. I was bouncing football, but there was always something going on in New York.
I like listening to music, but I never really drank because of football, so I was never a big party guy. But when I was in New York, I was able to really enjoy the music and get to know that world, especially electronic music, so I was able to make good connections and friendships there. That was very important for the festival. After a couple of years, I decided I didn’t want to play at Red Bull anymore because there was too much going on between New York and football; it was too hard to manage. So when I was 21, I moved back to Italy. I played in Italy for two and a half years, but eventually I started to hate football and the politics of it, the agents, the business side of it. So I started trying to come up with ideas of what else I could do.
Unfortunately, I missed out on most of my educational years. I didn’t go to college because I was playing. I went to high school and everything, but I didn’t go to a university. One day, I was with one of my best friends, who lives in Fanna, and we were driving around. We passed this really cool space, and I asked him what it was—I didn’t even know there was an airport, honestly. It was the perfect place for a festival because we’re on the beach and everything is cool, I thought. He was like, “Well, there’s a new mayor coming to office this summer. Should we present him something?” We were laughing about it, but we decided to do it, even though we’d never done events.
Not even a club night or a small show or gig?
Nothing! I’ve never done anything in the event space.
That’s crazy.
I went to events and a bunch of festivals, but I stopped going because it felt like they were all the same, copy and paste. Same line-ups, same type of stage, the big LEDs. It’s just a festival; it’s not an actual brand—most of them anyway. Except TomorrowLand, who have a really beautiful brand and everything. Anyway, I made a deck on Canva and added some pictures of various festivals. I put various artist names that we wanted to book on this deck—we got none of those artists, by the way—and we presented it to the mayor.
Meanwhile, I was still training and we were about to fly out for pre-season. I remember it was 7am and I was out in the parking lot where we trained, and I was like, I’m so over this. I hate football. I hate it. I hate it! So I went to my director that day and I was like, “I’m done.” I had a year left of my contract, and I left, went back to New York, and started focusing on the festival full-on. Then I came back… Actually, I didn’t come back; I mean, it was all online. And then, in October, the city announced the festival. And I woke up one morning in New York and was like, “What do you mean they announced it?
How long ago was it that you realised this was really happening?
That was mid-October last year.
Last year? Wow.
Yeah, not even a year. That was nine months ago—and I was in New York. I had no idea where to start! So I just started looking at DJs that I like to see if I could find contacts. I started with Rüfüs Du Sol, found his agent, reached out, and that’s how it started. Actually, the first name we signed—and I want to thank him so much for believing in us—was Franky Wah. We were lucky enough to meet Zarya and Ric from STUFISH, the stage designers. We had a Zoom call where I showed them this sketch I had made on my iPad of this Roman structure I found. I always thought a 360 stage would be very cool. I did hesitate at first because it had never been done before, and I thought maybe it was a stupid idea. But I took a risk, showed them my sketch and they were obsessed! Two weeks later, we all flew into Fano and toured the city.
There’s a whole Roman city under Fano. You can see all the Roman markets, the columns, everything’s below the city. So we studied that, all the Roman architecture around the city, and everyone fell in love with the whole concept. We started to get traction when we actually had a cool brand that we worked on with our marketing team. People liked it. It was different. By the time we released the first images of the stages, all we had were renderings. I was going to different events to New York. I was like, “Look at my phone! Look at this. What do you think of the stage?” And people really liked it.
How did you get Franky Wah on board?
I reached out to him on Instagram because I’d seen him in Ibiza the summer before and thought he was really amazing. He helped me a lot; he got us through the whole process and he stuck with us. He was our first signing and then, from that, Sven Väth joined. Getting Rufus was another big achievement for us. It was no small process to get some of them. I was pleading with management agents, like: “Please just show the artist, your client—show them vision. Don’t decide for them. Let them decide. If they don’t want to do it, that’s fine.” Thankfully, they all loved the idea and the concept. Then from being a small-scale festival, it started growing. In about two days of tickets being on-sale, we had 5,000 people locked in to come. Then it grew to 17,000… It grew very fast, extremely fast.
That must have been a great feeling, seeing the interest grow.
It was, man. Luckily, through my connections in New York, I was able to present this project to investors because you need money to do these things, unfortunately. But they all believed in the project and the vision. We were able to close the acts and everything went pretty smooth. The city of Fano helped us, too. It was very fast. Extremely difficult at first, but everyone was great. If you asked me two days before the festival, “Would you ever do it again?” I would’ve said, “Absolutely not!” But after the festival, when I saw the reactions and everything, I was like, “100% I’ll do it again.”
There’s a few things I wanted to touch on. You mentioned there were a lot of festivals that seemed very samey to you and you wanted to do something more original. I know you mentioned TomorrowLand, but which other festivals were you looking at and taking notes?
Honestly, I didn’t really look at festivals. If I look at too many things, I’m going to get confused. I probably should have done so because there were things we noticed that will be fixed next year. Maybe if I’d done more research, I could have done better, but I didn’t want to steer away too much from our vision.
Now that you’ve had some time to assess it all, what are some of the big successes and some of the things that you would do differently next time?
I think the biggest success was the Hangar stage, which is a techno stage. Everybody was geared towards that. Everyone in Italy loves techno. One thing I might do differently, though, is change the layout of the stages. We found that we placed the entrance facing The Temple stage, so if people were walking in, they see only that stage, which we thought was a really cool entrance—the gateway to this new city. But because of that, some people just entered the festival and stayed at The Temple while Hangar was on the other side. As the nights went on, that changed, but there was a bit of a gap to start.
Another thing that we’re going to do is integrate more parties around the city. We did one on Thursday in this ancient Roman church where the roof collapsed, like a thousand years ago, because of a fire. I loved that one. There are a lot of other locations like that around the city and we’re working on adding more, a bit like Sonar.
What has been the reaction among the locals? What was the balances of locals to tourists?
The locals are very happy. The hype around the city is massive because there’s never been an event like this. We hit 36 countries exactly. It was crazy! I still have all the data, but I believe over 20% were outside of Italy. There was a couple Manchester that came who found out about the festival from social media. They showed up and they had The Temple tattooed on themselves. Obviously, we’re really proud of tourism we brought to the final. It was the most tourists they’ve ever had.
Was Italy always going to be the spot, or did you look at anywhere else?
No, I never looked elsewhere besides Fano. I just knew that airport was perfect for a festival. But yeah, there’s a lot of expenses that you don’t realise you need, even until the day of the festival, during the festival. There are always issues that pop up last second. You end up running to the supermarket or to the convenience store [laughs]. It’s funny, man. Our main focus was on security. We couldn’t let anything go wrong on that front and, thankfully, it didn’t.
Will it always stay in that region? Are you looking at moving it around at all?
I want to keep the whole festival there; I think it’s a perfect location for a music festival. We can grow massively. We used about one-fifth of the land of the airport—it’s really, really big. What we’re working on is doing pop-ups in various cities. Last year, we did one in New York, which went really well, and then we did a few other cities. That’s something I’m working on for the whole year to keep up the brand awareness. We’ve been thinking about making a mobile festival that we can transport anywhere in the world, so it might be in a city near you very soon.
