Scala!!!

It's always a bit like a dream.

The stickiness of the floor, the smell of fags.

God, those days when you could smoke and drink.

The glamour of the people that you might see there.

That late-night weird feeling

of maybe a few substances were involved,

keeping you awake.

That excitement of being part of a secret world.

The screen's stained with beer,

the whole place shakes when the Tubes run,

the sound system's crap, but we love it.

Mark Moore at the Scala.

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.

Where there is error, may we bring truth.

Gentlemen of the press, get ready,

cos you are about to witness

the biggest news event of the year.

Say hello to my little friend!

I'm walking here!

I did take Divine to see a Bergman movie on acid,

and he... and when she ripped her face off in Hour of the Wolf,

he said, "I'm never ever doing this again.

I'm only seeing Elizabeth Taylor movies."

The first time I discovered the Scala must have been 1979.

I think I was 14, 15.

I was a juvenile punk rocker.

And I lived in North Finchley,

and my father had remarried, so I couldn't live with him,

so he put us in a bed and breakfast, um, uh...

and gave us money for Kentucky Fried Chicken to fend for ourselves.

And I would spend the money on going to the movies.

I had this mate, Simon Gargette, who was really on the ball,

like, "We have to go and see this band called Joy Division."

And he said, "We have to go and see this new film called Eraserhead."

I was first in line for tickets for Eraserhead. I'm first in the queue.

I'm not gonna muck about. And I couldn't wait.

I'd heard about this film and I was on it, and it blew my mind.

Beginning of February, I just saw Eraserhead is on

at this place called the Scala.

Where it was made zero difference to me.

That was just...

I came in, completely, um... unwitting.

And then... then I saw this cinema,

and the whole experience was as much about the cinema as the film.

That's what caught me by surprise.

The film, I was expecting it to be something powerful,

but not the place where I saw it.

It was just another world.

So a lot of the punters who went to the Scala,

especially the punters who went to the original Tottenham Street Scala,

were quite nihilistic, you know, as we all were,

and they liked the dark side of things.

And Eraserhead was certainly dark and kind of ghastly.

Oh, you are sick.

It was like a real nightmare kind of world.

The chicken, you know, that was still moving

after it was cooked and everything, you know.

The girl with the cheeks and all that.

And all those uncomfortable looks.

A friend took me to see Eraserhead,

and I was completely freaked out by it.

And I was so freaked out by this... this thing,

this thing that kept... kept, like, you know, palpitating and...

And my friend could see me growing visibly upset and disturbed,

and she said, "We'd better leave now, because this thing's gonna grow up."

She'll be all right in a minute.

Sitting there in the Scala watching David Lynch's Eraserhead

was just mind-blowing.

It just set the blueprint for the kind of films that I wanted to see.

Certain cinemas showed certain types of films.

The Scala did all of it.

They just went, "We're doing all of that.

And we're also gonna add these fucked-up films as well.

We're gonna add these pornographic, banned,

but actually really interesting films."

There was no way of seeing all of these films

you read about in history books or had heard about.

So it was that sense of discovering things

and being able to do that on a big screen.

One of the things we really specialised in was tracking down prints

of movies that hadn't been seen for years

or that we'd never actually managed to be able to see.

We were just so much more eclectic.

We tried to put in as much and as varied a programme of music as we could

in terms of the film things that we showed.

But it became an essential element to making the Scala

a little bit different from other repertory cinemas.

I had recognised early on, through my exposure to punk,

that music was a way of reinvigorating ideas

and, uh, introducing young people to political notions

that they may have thought were a bit boring, a bit hippyish,

a bit not very, not really for them.

And we also had this fabulous jukebox.

They had all these amazing things on, like Joy Division

and a bit of rock and roll,

Magazine.

There was a sort of, like, collection of us

that was sort of all about the, you know, this...

the idea of being, you know, subversive

and a subterranean scene, which

people would talk more and more about the Scala.

"You should go to the Scala. Scala's like... It's really going on there."

People would go there en masse from gigs and clubs.

Punks and Post-punks and New Romantics and all kinds of people.

It became another place, really,

to sort of see yourself through the community.

I always think of that Paul Schrader script, Taxi Driver.

"All the animals come out at night.

Whores, dopers, queens, pussies, junkies, venal scum."

And I was like, "Yeah, that was us!"

Uh, you know, plus rent boys and, uh, wannabe pop stars

and, uh, just people who didn't wanna go to bed on Saturday night, you know.

So, I'm behind the coffee bar, it's kind of quiet,

it's about 2:30 to 3 o'clock in the morning,

but that was when things could get interesting.

So, anyway, this kid comes through the door, and he comes...

He's got long hair, right, and his hair is combed up

to a point about two feet above his head and gelled.

And it was like I'd never seen anything like it in my life.

And to come in the door, he actually had to go like that, like...

And then he was in.

He's actually got painted-on eyebrows as well, and he's kind of like...

He's dressed up, like, he's properly dressed up.

He's sitting with his mates who are also dressed up.

Normally you'd think they're dressed up,

but they look pale in comparison to this kid who's, like, extraordinary.

He comes over to the coffee bar and I'm like, "All right?"

He goes, "What you got to drink?"

I said, "I've got coffee or tea. I've got some juices and this, that."

He goes, "I'll have a nice cup of tea, please."

I was like, "All right."

So I makes him a cup of tea, gives it to him, and he goes over.

About ten minutes later, I can hear him singing.

He sang the whole song in the coffee bar.

He was like a proper weirdo.

About three months later, I'm looking at Top of the Pops

and there he is at number one with Culture Club,

singing Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?

He was a regular down there. I didn't know who he was.

And I never saw him looking like that again.

And the beauty of the Scala was, you know,

when you tried to get into X-rated movies aged 14,

you normally got turned away.

At the Scala, they didn't care how old you were. They let you in.

So you were seeing all these amazing movies

like Pasolini's Salò, 120 Days of Sodom.

You were seeing, I don't know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

All these things you'd dreamed about seeing but never could.

And sometimes you didn't have enough money to get in,

so you'd cobble the money together for one person to pay to get in,

which would normally be me, cos I looked kind of young and innocent,

go downstairs and there'd be a little door

which led to the outside basement bit with the stairs going up.

So you could open that door and everyone would sneak in

and then just run through into the cinema.

And, of course, you know, I got caught loads of times.

I would be, like, physically evicted.

I was branded a troublemaker by Steve Woolley.

I was banned for... I think it was a couple of weeks.

I'd turn up, and eventually everyone just begged that the ban was lifted on me,

and Steve Woolley lifted the ban on me.

So, yeah, I was a bit of a Scala teenage troublemaker.

We'd pick nights to go,

like, we'd go en masse, maybe 30 or 40 of us,

to see Jubilee by Derek Jarman, the punk film.

You know, and we'd be quite rowdy, you know.

People got really impatient during the Elizabethan scenes

which they thought was really boring and too Shakespearean.

Where is God?

Is God dead?

And now we watch it and we love those scenes.

But I think at the time all the punks hated those bits.

Yeah, I got into Derek Jarman because of that film,

and of course I went back to the Scala to see Sebastiane,

which, um, I'd never seen such a homoerotic film,

and that was a great thing to see at that age, you know,

when you're discovering your way

and just about to start going to gay clubs

and things like that, so that was fantastic,

and Derek Jarman soon, quite rightly, became a hero.

Late 1979 throughout 1980, um... it was a period of change in fashion.

Punk was on the way out. New Romantic was beginning.

I remember, you know, seeing people dressed as pirates,

seeing people with knee breeches.

Spandau Ballet were a bunch of boys

that sort of became the sort of house band

at the Blitz club, which was, um, the spiritual home

of the New Romantic scene that I was part of.

They wanted to do a showcase, they'd done a whole body of work,

and the chosen venue was the Scala.

And it was quite sort of an occasion.

Walking into the Scala,

they'd backlit the stage,

so the whole thing looked very atmospheric.

It was a real sort of moment, actually.

I think it really set the scene.

It really set a sort of exciting,

um, and creative landscape

of art, music, fashion, style,

which actually, you know, carried on throughout the '80s.