“It was like joining a club,” says the director John Waters. “A very secret club, like a biker gang or something. It’s like they were a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high.”
As celebrated by Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s new documentary, Scala!!! Or, The Incredibly Strange Rise of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How it Influenced a Mixed-Up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits, London’s Scala cinema was all this and more. An early taste of the building’s capacity to embed itself in potent pop-cultural moments came in one single week in 1972 when Mick Rock’s live shots of Iggy Pop and then Lou Reed became the cover images of their Raw Power and Transformer albums. Both photographs were taken at the Scala in its first incarnation as a concert venue. But the place really came into its own in 1981 when, after a brief interlude as an indoor forest for primates, it became a cinema. It opened with a screening of King Kong, as a semi-conscious tribute to its former occupants. Welcome to the monkey house, indeed.
