Conception and realization of the Moonlight Festival

New Wave was a musical movement which originated from the mid-1970s. It emerged from punk rock as a reaction against the popular music of the 1970s. New Wave incorporated various influences such as the rock 'n' roll styles of the pre-hippie era as well as aspects of mod subculture, electronic music, disco, and funk.
The term New Wave itself is a source of much confusion. It was introduced in 1976 in Great Britain by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren as an alternative label for what was also being called "punk". The term referenced the avant-garde, stylish French New Wave film movement of the 1960s. The label was soon picked up by British punk fanzines such as Sniffin' Glue and then the professional music press.
Thus, the term "New Wave" was initially interchangeable with "punk".
In the United States, Seymour Stein, the head of Sire Records, needed a term by which he could market his newly signed bands, who had frequently played the club CBGB. Because radio consultants in the U.S. had advised their clients that punk rock was a fad (and because many stations that had embraced disco had been hurt by the backlash), Stein settled on the term "New Wave". Like those film makers, his new artists, such as Ramones and Talking Heads, were anti-corporate, experimental, and from a generation that had grown up as critical consumers of the art they now practiced.
Soon, listeners began to differentiate some of these musicians from "true punks". The music journalist Charles Shaar Murray, in writing about the Boomtown Rats, has indicated that the term New Wave became an industry catch-all for musicians affiliated with the punk movement, but in some way different from it:
The Rats didn’t conform precisely to the notional orthodoxies of punk, but then neither did many other bands at the forefront of what those who were scared of the uncompromising term 'punk' later bowdlerized to New Wave. You weren’t allowed to have long hair! The Ramones did. Guitar solos verboten! The defence calls Television. Facial hair a capital offence! Two members of The Stranglers are in mortal danger. Age police on the prowl for wrinklies on the run! Cells await Ian Dury, Knox from The Vibrators and most of The Stranglers. Pedal steel guitars and country music too inextricably linked with Laurel Canyon coke-hippies and snooze-inducing Mellow Mafia singer/songwriterismo. Elvis Costello, you’re busted.
Music that followed the anarchic garage band ethos of the Sex Pistols was distinguished as "punk", while music that tended toward experimentation, lyrical complexity, or more polished production, was categorized as "New Wave". This came to include musicians who had come to prominence in the British pub rock scene of the mid-1970s, such as Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Eddie and the Hot Rods and Dr Feelgood;acts associated with the New York club CBGBs, such as Television, Patti Smith, and Blondie; and singer-songwriters who were noted for their barbed lyrical wit, such as Elvis Costello, Tom Robinson and Joe Jackson. Furthermore, many artists who would have originally been classified as punk were also termed New Wave. A 1977 Phonogram compilation album of the same name (New Wave) features US artists including the Dead Boys, Ramones, Talking Heads and The Runaways.
Later still, "New Wave" came to imply a less noisy, more pop sound, and to include acts manufactured by record labels, while the term post-punk was coined to describe the darker, less pop-influenced groups, as Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Cure, and The Psychedelic Furs. Although distinct, punk, New Wave, and post-punk all shared common ground: an energetic reaction to the supposedly overproduced, uninspired popular music of the 1970s.
According to Tom Petty journalists had difficulties defining acts like his Heartbreakers that they felt were not Punk rock but had an association with acts such as The Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello.
Dark Wave, also written as Darkwave, is an umbrella term which refers to a movement that began in the late 1970s, coinciding with the popularity of New Wave and Post-punk music. Building upon the basic principles of those musical movements, Dark Wave evolved through the addition of dark, introspective lyrics and an undertone of sorrow. Dark Wave is inseparably connected with the stylistic developments of the late 1970s and the 1980s. In the 1980s, a subculture developed within the Dark Wave movement, whose members were called "wavers" or "dark wavers".
Goth rock was originally included in the movement so Darkwave became an important part of the goth scene and closely connected with the goth subculture.
The term was coined in Europe in the 1980s, to describe a dark and melancholy variant of New Wave and Post-punk music, described as Gothic rock in the UK, first applied to the music of British musicians such as Bauhaus,Joy Division,The Cure,Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins, Anne Clark, Fad Gadget, Soft Cell, Gary Numan and Depeche Mode.
The movement spread internationally, spawning such developments as the French Coldwave or dark synthpop, called "Electrowave" in Germany. Subsequently, different Dark Wave genres blended with electronic music (synthpop, ambient and post-industrial). Attrition, In The Nursery and Pink Industry (UK), Clan of Xymox (Netherlands), Die Form (France), and Psyche (Canada) played this music in the 1980s.