London 4 October 2016 The Man Whose Head Expanded. Not in a good Mark E Smith kind of way, though. Oh no. Sadly not. In a kids-back-at-school, viral-laboratory, I’d-like-to-just-lie-down-in-this-ditch kind of way. Taking the bus down to The Scala, I wonder how long it will be until my eyeballs just […]
The Scala
13 posts
London 25 April 2016 Just as everyone thought that Spring had really, finally, definitively arrived, fresh and rosy-fingered, Winter once more puts its cold, cold hand back onto our shoulders. Arriving at The Scala (always redolent with memories of all-night Eighties quadruple bills and marathon Shock Around the Clock gorefests1) […]
London 26 November 2015 This keeps on happening at the moment: two great gigs are on the same night. A couple of weeks back it was Graveyard versus Pentagram and tonight it’s Uncle Acid versus Om. It says a lot about the exponential growth of the doom/stoner/occult rock scene in […]
London 12 November 2015 It was my friend Lee Nite who first played me an album by High On Fire. I knew and loved Sleep’s work, but had kind of considered that HOF’s sound was a little too fast for my doom/stoner rock ears. He slipped on their first album […]
London 11 July 2013 So the first problem is always going to be that, writing after the fact, things get a bit distorted. Nazoranai were utterly amazing. To the extent that what, on any other night, would’ve been a totally formidable set from the Flower/Corsano Duo ended up falling flat […]
London 30 September 2012 Tonight is all about the HEAVY. Not so much the Metal, though its ghost and spiritual guidance flow out of everything Om do like ectoplasm, but definitely the HEAVY. In capitals. Always in capitals. On paper, given a reductive genre-based taxonomical description of each act, King Midas […]
The Scala, London 12 April 2011 Sabbath Assembly is the rather surprising spin-off from noise-manglers and avant scribblers the No-Neck Blues Band. Surprising why, exactly? Not just because they show that, yes, they are actually good musicians, but that they can also play tight, Seventies-style power pop of the sort […]
The Scala, London 11 December 2010 The first time I saw The Orb play live was at the time of the release of their album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. At that time the techno/ambient/trance scene was at an all-time high with a plethora of new bands using psychedelic images and […]
London 26 July 2009 Southern Lord have been doing good business resurrecting their roster from the first time round, with some spectacularly lavish re-releases from Burning Witch, for example, making it strange to reflect that their twentieth anniversary isn’t too far off yet… So it’s only to be applauded that […]
The Scala, London 20 November 2007 This has been a long time coming. Last time I tried to see Jesu (supporting Jarboe, in this very venue) it got scaled down to a Justin Broadrick solo perfomance as Final, which consisted of him hunched over his laptop making incredible noises. Now, […]
London 12 October 2003 Witnessing Laibach perform onstage is guaranteed to be a spectacular experience – not in the form of flaming scenery, explosives or even sheer brutalist noise, but because they put on a show. A proper show with much too much in common with a political rally for […]
London 21 March 2001 In tow with the usual Krautrock London posse I arrived at The Scala just in time to hear lots of talk about how a lot of people have not been here since it was a infamous cinema. Though I never saw it in its glory, the […]
The Scratch Club The Scala, London 25th March 1999 First of all, the venue; once upon a time, The Scala was both the worst and best of London’s independent cinemas – terrible seats, ropey sound and a generally scuzzy atmosphere, saved by the murals, the cat and a programming selection […]