Fleapit revisited:Scala!!! or the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World's Weirdest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-Up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits.

I only visited the Scala as a cinema once. It was some time in the early nineties, at the end of a very drunken night out, and it was one of the few places we could find that was (a) still open and (b) would let us in. They were showing Wayne's World 2 (which came out in 1993) and, other than that, I don't remember much about the night except one of my mates complaining he'd already seen the film, that there were lots and lots of trailers for cult movies, and that most of us fell asleep pretty promptly - if not particularly comfortably.

In retrospect, I/we should have paid more attention to our surroundings. According to Ali Catteral and Jane Giles's new film, - the unwieldy titled (and let's not even start with the multiple exclamation marks) Scala!!! or the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World's Weirdest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-Up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits, we missed out.

On any given night we may have found people stoned, speeding, tripping, passed out in the corridors, being fellated in the toilets, or having sex in the cinema himself. Others would be shouting out spoilers to films just to spite the audience, posing, or, in the case of a pre-fame Boy George, drinking a cup of tea in the bar while singing Day Trip to Bangor by Fiddler's Dram.

Some, like us, would simply be asleep. It was cheaper, sometimes free, to get into the Scala than it was a hotel or a taxi home. Even a nightbus. Stewart Lee talks about finishing gigs in East London and, because he was living way out west in Acton (an incredible seven or eight miles from Kings Cross), turning up at the Scala for the night before leaving as the sun came up. On one occasion he was invited back to somebody's flat (at 6am on a Sunday morning) and on another he was showered by liquid from a passing car as the perpetrator shouted to him "How do you like that? That's my piss".

Lee is but one of many, many talking heads who turn up in Scala!!! to reminisce about the crazy days between 1978 and 1993 when it was opened as a cult, or mondo, cinema. There's Barry Adamson (who also provides the soundtrack), Adam Buxton, ex-Mary Chain bassist Douglas Hart, Matt Johnson, Isaac Julien, Caroline Catz, Beeban Kidron, Mark Moore of S-Express (who started attending as a 14 year old living in a nearby B&B so his dad could spend more time with his new girlfriend), James O'Brien, Princess Julia, John Akomfrah, Ralph Brown (Danny in Withnail & I), JG Thirlwell, Nick Kent, Cathi Unsworth, Jah Wobble, Ben Wheatley, Peter Strickland, and Kim Newman.

Even John Waters is on hand to reminisce about Divine eating dog shit and being arrested and charged for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure when making Mondo Trasho in the late sixties. It's something he had in common with those who ran the Scala, a cinema whose run came to an end in 1993 when they showed an illegally sourced projection of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

The Scala's cinema years ended (as they began) with Merlan B. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1933 classic King Kong but in between they showed pretty much everything that your mainstream, chain, cinemas would shy away from. Lots of blaxploitation, lots of sexploitation, lots of horror, lots of kung fu, and lots of gay cinema. There were, also - quite surprisingly for a place that can't have been raking it in, one hell of a lot of fund raisers for good causes. The Scala was part of the counterculture during the eighties. An era, one might say, that was the last to truly enjoy a counterculture.

Much of it due to Margaret Thatcher and the cultural wrecking ball policies that have inspired today's crop of amoral and culturally barren Tories. Some of the films have stood the test of time better than others but that never seemed to worry the bookers at the Scala. We see clips of David Lynch's Eraserhead, Waters' Pink Flamingos, John Carpenter's The Thing, Derek Jarman's Jubilee, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom. As well as Curt McDowell's 1755 pornographic black comedy horror Thundercrack! Which looks like at an event in itself.

All to an audience of punks, post-punks, new romantics, radical feminists, queer activists, Agnes Varda completists, curious outsiders, and people, like me and my friends, who just didn't want to go home on a Saturday night. During the all night Shock Around The Clocke events nobody had to. Bands would play too. From future mainstream darlings like Spandau Ballet to edgier, more typically Scala adjacent outfits, like Throbbing Gristle.

That was in keeping with the venue's history (and, as it happened, future) as a live venue. In July 1972, over the course of two nights, both Lou Reed and Iggy and The Stooges both played at the Scala. Reed, according to Nick Kent, was nervous, dressed like a celebrity ice hockey player, and had completely misjudged his audience. Iggy, on the other hand, simply scared his audience, backflipping, chucking the mic stand in the air, and jumping into the crowd topless in skintight silver trousers. Iggy, in 1972, quite clearly, did not give a fuck.

The photos Mick Rock took of these two gigs ended up gracing the covers of Reed's Transformer and The Stooges' Raw Power. Two of the most seminal rock albums ever recorded. There's a blue plaque outside the Scala now (which, in the film, we can see Thurston Moore unveiling) to mark those gigs but there is, as yet, nothing to mark the fact that Britain's most exciting, and most chaotic, cinema once stood there.

There's a lot about how the King's Cross of the late seventies and eighties was a dangerous place. Heroin needles lying in the street, plenty of people offering to fill you in, and (and, yes, they do use this rather quaint term) 'ladies of the night' everywhere. The staff at the Scala were equally reprobate in their behaviour - often stoned, speeding, or on mushrooms. Though there is one amusing story about a shocked staff member accidentally pulling a sleeping man's prosthetic arm off when trying to wake him at the end of an all night session.

The stories of the things that happened, both on and off screen, at the Scala are legendary and it only seems right that a venue so in love with film, the power of film, and the power of film to change people's lives, should be celebrated in film. I went to see it at the Rio in Dalston which, while not being anywhere near as anarchic or boundary pushing as the Scala was in its heyday, is still flying the flag for independent cinema in London (shout outs too - to the Peckhamplex and the Whirled in Brixton) and long may it do so.

I left the Rio, and I left Dalston (though not until I'd had a pizza and a Coke in Pizza Union) with a long list of films I want to watch (or watch again) and that's just how it should be. Cinema should entertain you, of course, but cinema should also inspire you and the Scala inspired an entire generation of, as it says in its title, weirdos and misfits to carry on being weirdos and misfits and create their own art. I might not be watching Thundercrack! any time soon but Scala!!!, when it comes right down to it, has earned all three of those exclamation marks. That's my piss. How do you like it?