Welcome to the microplex! The hidden world of Britain’s 1,500 tiny cinemas
It’s a warm autumn evening and the graffiti along the side wall of Bristol’s Cube Microplex cinema shouts in the unseasonal sunshine as a gaggle of people gather quietly around the front gates. They are here for a screening of five short films, showcasing the work of some of the UK’s up-and-coming black film-makers. Several of the writers and directors are expected, and there is a tantalising buzz of voices from the cinema courtyard.
The punters surge in and are directed to a cash-only volunteer-run bar, before settling into faded velvet seats in a 100-seat auditorium. There is a ripple of excitement when someone in the audience recognises a famous face. She can’t quite put a name to him, but all becomes clear when the first film opens: it’s an exploration of fatherhood featuring the three Plummer brothers, Tremaine, Twaine and Tristan, who became celebrities through their appearances on TV’s Gogglebox.
The screenings are part of an occasional Regional Voices night by local impresario and activist Gary Thompson, who has set up a company, Cables & Cameras, dedicated to promoting talent from ethnic minorities in the UK. Tonight’s participants have travelled in from London and Birmingham as well as Bristol, and afterwards they sit around chatting with each other and the audience. “There’s a whole new generation of talented black and brown film-makers who are exploring the rich culture of various UK regions, but they don’t have a platform,” says Thompson. “The question is how to connect these diverse voices in a way that makes a difference.”
The Cube, which has been run by volunteers since it was founded in 1998, is one of the oldest independent cinemas in the UK. Counterintuitively, at a time of rising prices and falling incomes, many more have opened over the last few years. The UK now has 1,500 volunteer-run venues, according to Jaq Chell, CEO of the charity Cinema for All, which supports them with everything from licensing and insurance to equipment. Some are just popups in pubs or community halls. “It’s a hidden world, especially in rural places: anywhere you can set up a screen you can have a cinema.” She attributes the growth to a combination of lighter, more user-friendly equipment and successive changes to licensing laws, which have cut the bureaucracy for community venues with fewer than 500 seats.
But as Bristol demonstrates, there are many different types of independent cinema. A little over a mile away from the Cube, up a flight of cobbled steps, a different sort of screening is taking place at one of the UK’s last surviving video shops. At 20th Century Flicks, which is like a retro sweet shop
for movie buffs, its shelves crammed floor to ceiling with filmic allsorts, from the latest DVDs to a heap of 20thcentury laserdiscs, that customers keep donating because they are basically unplayable today. “We’re hoarders,” says Daisy Steinhardt, before heading off to load up this evening’s film in the 18seater Videodrome, a vintage cinema in miniature that opens off one side of the shop. On the other side is the even smaller Kino, whose 10 seats are available for £80, or £50 for couples looking for a romantic night out.
The shop was founded in 1982, but has moved location a couple of times, ending up in its current spot nine years ago. “We have discovered what solvency means. It means subsidising the rental with the cinema,” says owner Dave Taylor. He also runs screenings in an old, purpose-built Imax cinema which was rediscovered, complete with fully functional equipment, in the building now occupied by the Bristol Aquarium. Among his recent offerings was: “Threadgames – a nuclear double-bill”, a film night that piggybacked on the Barbenheimer phenomenon to present two back-to-back 1980s classics, War Games and Threads.
You can see why Bristol is one of the UK’s two Unesco Cities of film (along with Bradford): it is buzzing with entrepreneurial enthusiasm. The city already has eight cinemas, but a campaign is under way to reclaim another in the east of the city. The Redfield sits on a busy street corner behind an unglamorous pebbledash wall. It opened in 1912 but – like so many art deco cinemas in the UK – it was converted into a bingo hall in the 1960s. It then became a fast food restaurant, and when that also closed a few years ago, the original interior was found to be largely intact.
Spearheading the campaign are Paul Burke and Dave Taylor-Matthews, who have enlisted local architecture students to draw up plans for a threescreen cinema with a food hall, supported by the development of social housing above it. It is a model that has been rolled out successfully elsewhere in the UK, mostly in the south-east of England. “I make the distinction between community and social cinema,” says Taylor-Matthews. “I don’t want to be dismissive of a movement that has brought film to all sorts of areas, but if you say ‘community cinema’, you think of Disney sending out videos to community halls with folding chairs and bad projection. That’s not what we are about.”
It’s not lost on them that Cineworld, one of the world’s largest chains that has a multiplex in the south of the city, has recently had a close brush with bankruptcy. The big screen multiplex model is in trouble, they say, because changing viewing habits mean there aren’t many films that can attract 600 people to often out-of-the-way venues. But it’s not only the big chains that are suffering. A new survey by the Independent Cinema Office revealed that, out of the 157 independent cinemas sampled, 45% are operating at a loss this year, with 42% predicting that they will close in a year or less unless things improve.
So why are so many still opening (or reopening, as two Filmhouse cinemas in Edinburgh and Aberdeen are on course to do next year)? “We show films that are of cultural significance,” says Rod White, the head of programming at Edinburgh Filmhouse. “There’s a whole stream of films that wouldn’t exist in this country if you didn’t have these sorts of venues that are prepared to show ones that are not commercial.”
Another eternal optimist is Tony Mundin, the founder and director of Northern Light Cinema, a family business that now has cinemas in Cumbria, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Greater Manchester. He is currently in negotiation for a new venue in the Manchester area that will be his smallest yet, with three screens, none with more than 50 seats. All of his cinemas, he says, are in market towns or urban villages, where regulars can walk in for a film and also have a drink. The new venue will have staggered screenings administered by a staff of three. “It’s all about keeping your borrowing and your staff size down, which is where the big boys have fallen down,” he says. “There’s no doubt that relatively small cinemas appeal to people because they get proper attention.”
It is not all plain sailing though, as the team behind another community cinema know. ActOne is a not-for-profit venue which opened in 2021 and has two 60-seater screens on the site of an old library in the west London borough of Ealing. It is a stylish, laid-back space, with free wifi in a cafe and bar area furnished with bookcases, sofas and a big table for remote workers or children’s parties.
ActOne is in an informal supportive partnership with two older London independents: the Phoenix in East Finchley and Dalston’s Rio Cinema. It has two full-time staff and up to six more who work on a shift basis, supported by a large team of local volunteers. But its founders’ calculations were based on a pre-pandemic average attendance between 30 and 40%. Since then, the growth in streaming has changed viewing habits, big films have been delayed by the Hollywood strikes, and they are always having to think of new ways to entice more people to come in.
One of their successes has been monthly screenings of plays recorded under the National Theatre Live programme. Three upcoming showings of Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s cult novel A Little Life, also quickly sold out. But they are also committed to meeting the demands of their community, such as Somali films. “We are very proud of what we have done,” says board member Nick Jones, “but film exhibition at the moment is a very tricky area to be involved in and we face monumental difficulties.”
Across the other side of the country, in the north Welsh town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, youth worker turned cinema factotum, Rhys Roberts, knows exactly what he means. Back in 2005, he bought the old police station from the local council for £127, thinking he would convert it into a theatre. But when he canvassed the young people he worked with about what they wanted, he says, top of the list was a McDonalds and second was a cinema. There had been no cinema in the town for 40 years, “so we bought a projector and a screen and started to run a film night.” One thing led to another, enabling Roberts to get funding to build a proper cinema, CellB, which is partially financed by a two-room hostel in part of the building.
CellB now employs three full-time staff, including two teenagers who came through the youth programme. Two years ago it opened a second 50seater screen in the old courtroom upstairs, “but we found there wasn’t much money to be made in film these days. Barbie packed it out for two weeks in the summer, but what people don’t realise is that the distributors want 50% of the takings. So we’re building up the cinema experience,” says Roberts. A lot depends on a recent investment in a huge pizza oven.
Back in Bristol, Taylor-Matthews looks out on a street full of people looking for a coffee or some groceries, and says that if the property developer who currently owns the Redfield site won’t release it, they will find another building nearby. For all the beauty of old cinema buildings, film is not just about bricks and mortar: it is about ways of being as well as seeing. “A lot of people will say: ‘I want to go out on Thursday. I will see what there is to do in my local area’. The competition nowadays isn’t a multiplex but the pub opposite and the restaurants up and down the street.”
If you say ‘community cinema’, you think of folding chairs and bad projection. That’s not what we are about
play them all again. “So we did that,” says Stella. “It was amazing!”
Ten days later the Bodysnatchers played a second show at the Windsor Castle, again supporting the Nips, with the added pressure of ska legends Neol Davies, Pauline Black and Jerry Dammers standing down the front and, says Nicky, “Richard Branson running around shrieking: has anyone signed them yet?” The band fielded offers from the likes of EMI, Stiff and Virgin; Jerry was offering a two-single deal with 2 Tone Records. The Bodysnatchers voted and unanimously elected 2 Tone. “It all happened in two weeks,” says Nicky. “To make a decision, find a lawyer, record a single to coincide with the Selecter tour, and do all that and be thinking, ‘Shit! Am I being ripped off?’ I was out of my depth.”
“A fucking joke,” says Rhoda of the legal document. Too young to care, Miranda says “there was very little analysis. It was just, ‘Whoa! Great!’, like we were on some amazing rollercoaster ride.”
Cut at CBS Studios, debut single Let’s Do Rock Steady was released on 7 March 1980, entered the Top 40, and the Bodysnatchers accepted an invitation to appear on Top of the Pops. The limousine driver sent to pick up Rhoda in Brixton discovered she was busy shopping. “I came back and the limo was outside my flat. My dad was going, ‘This poor man is waiting for you. Where have you been?’ I said, ‘Firstly, this poor man is early, and secondly, I’m paying for this poor man to sit here so don’t you worry.’”
Three weeks later, they made a second appearance on Top of the Pops, Let’s Do Rock Steady now at a healthier No 22 in the charts. Positioned at the lip of the stage facing the studio audience, Jane spun round on her drum stool and began conducting her dancing bandmates with her sticks. It would be the last time they would appear on the show, but for now, the Bodysnatchers exhibited all the signs of a bona fide pop act.
On tour in spring 1980 supporting the Selecter, Rhoda would run from one side of the stage to the other, imploring the crowd to dance. “She really held it together,” admires Miranda. “She was such a great front person and had a good rapport with the audience. No one was a great musician. We were learning and getting better the more we played. If things went wrong or we were out of time, Rhoda would say, ‘Oh, fucking hell! Come on, let’s do it again.’ Nothing fazed her. She rolled with it and carried all of us.”
The group once attempted Mule Jerk five times and still failed to move beyond the introduction. “We weren’t good enough,” Rhoda says. “There wasn’t any leap of imagination. If it hadn’t been for Penny, we wouldn’t have been able to write any songs. She was the one who could say, ‘We’re playing in this key. This is where you need to play … these are the notes.’ Nobody had a clue. It was a baptism of fire.” Adamant that they were a product of punk as much as ska, Nicky Summers argues, “It wasn’t the point to be a proficient musician. It was about getting your thoughts across or your attitude or your energy or your fury or whatever it was. That was a large feature of the Bodysnatchers.”
Men mocked the novelty of an allwoman group. “Whenever we did a soundcheck there was a lot of expectation that we would not be able to play our instruments,” continues Penny in despair. “Roadies on the side of the stage with their arms folded going, ‘This is going to be a laugh!’” Night by night, the Bodysnatchers stood by the side of the stage and studied the stagecraft of the Selecter, how they got from one song to the next, until “slowly and surely we got tight”, says Penny. “The lighting crews and roadies changed their tune and realised we weren’t just a bunch of girls to be laughed at.”
“By the end of the tour,” adds SarahJane, “we were a different band.” The band got down to hard partying and innocent fun. “We were like school kids,” laughs Rhoda. “We all had water pistols and soaked journalists whose questions we didn’t like.” Physically exhausted, Penny says by the end of the tour she was throwing up. “I don’t think we ever went to bed before three in the morning. It was nuts.”
The party mood was abruptly silenced when a fight in the middle of the dancefloor in Guildford forced innocent fans to cower on the edges of the auditorium. “People would be dancing, then somebody would push somebody or want to get in front and then a fight would break out,” says Sarah-Jane. “It just seemed that is what men did on a Saturday night.” Miranda says stabbings were a common occurrence. “Many skinheads carried knives. It was nasty. National Front supporters would dance merrily to blackinfluenced music played by black musicians. I was too young and naive to make sense of it all. Nobody can.” Attributing their actions to “herd behaviour”, Penny says: “Part of 2 Tone was to educate the audience and say black people invented this music. You need to accept that the world is two tone. It was trying to make people aware of equality and to stop racism.”
At Friars Aylesbury, opposing gangs clashed on either side of a gaping hole in the audience. “You can’t play when people are fighting,” reasons Penny, “and sometimes it would be women,” she adds, bemused. In Middlesbrough, violence spilled onto the street when an angry mob smashed the windows of the Bodysnatchers’ van. Taking it upon themselves to challenge the inherent contradiction between supporting 2 Tone and having racist attitudes, members of the band questioned the agitators. “Yeah, but we like the music.” “What about Rhoda then?” one of the girls asked. “She’s alright,” came the response. “She’s a tart, ain’t she?”
***
Boldness of mind had taken the Bodysnatchers from blowing away the mystique surrounding rock’n’roll to courting the attention of the music business. But when amateurism mixed with professionalism, there was little give. A drummer who could not keep time proved too much. Writing in her diary after a show at Hastings Pier Pavilion, Penny Leyton noted, “Miranda and I discuss Jane with Rob Gambino [tour manager] who says she’s crap and band won’t last three months – band agree to get rid of her.” The following day, Nicky delivered the news and Jane graciously agreed to stay for the rest of the tour.
Never one to mince her words, Rhoda Dakar says that Jane was not only a “terrible drummer” but “a cow. She had a little plastic kit with a razor blade and a straw that she used to carry about with her. I just thought, you’re pathetic. I once asked Paul Cook [Sex Pistols] to try to teach her how to play reggae. He came to the rehearsal studio, but it was a pointless exercise. A band stands or falls by its drummer. When we had a decent drummer, suddenly the possibilities opened up.”
Never contractually signed to 2 Tone, the new drummer Judy Parsons’ first engagement was to promote a record she had not played on: their second single, Easy Life. The song addressed parity in working wages and society’s expectation for women to procreate. “The good thing about 20-yearolds writing songs,” says lyricist Rhoda, “is that their ideas are pure and unfettered with complications, like, ‘how the fuck are we going to achieve that then?’ It’s like saying, ‘Let’s go to the moon.’ There’s no notion of ‘we actually have to build the rocket’. At 20, I thought motherhood was a thing that dragged you down. It was doing what everyone else did. But with the genius of hindsight, I now know that it’s a very empowering role.”
But Easy Life failed to make an impact and talk of a Bodysnatchers album crashed. Only recently, Richard Branson had been desperate to sign the group, “offering the earth” according to Nicky, “but the rest of the band wouldn’t meet him. I met this woman in Notting Hill. She bought us pancakes and said Branson wanted to take us to Memphis with Aretha Franklin’s producer. Five people refused to play ball. I don’t know why? It was like, ‘Aaarrggh! How can you let that go?’” Adding to their woes, the Bodysnatchers were broke.
Mulling over their precarious status, Penny says, “We were a novelty and novelty sells: an all-girl group playing ska; people were seeing great profit potential in us. But the fairytale had come to an end.” By the autumn Rhoda concluded, “We’d sacked the manager. We didn’t have a deal and we didn’t have a plan.”
“Ugly”, “nasty” and “physical” are three words repeatedly used by band members when retelling the break-up of the Bodysnatchers. Four decades after the event, Penny singles out a key moment where she remembers Rhoda throttling guitarist Sarah-Jane. Then, locating her diary from 1980, she is shocked at what she reads: “Friday 10 October, Edinburgh Uni [Freshers’ Ball]. Rhoda upset because she had to get up at 4pm for soundcheck which she didn’t have until 5.30pm. Causes hysterical scene, shouts at SJ and Miranda, tries to strangle me … I decide definitely things can’t continue this way …”
“It was me!” screams Penny, stunned. “Obviously I put that out of my memory and transferred it to SJ.” On hearing this, Rhoda also cries out. “What! I had her by her throat? Nah! Penny was a fruit-loop. Somebody said something that really annoyed me, so I had a go at them. Then Simon, our roadie, jumped in the middle and started having a go at me. Then my brother jumped in and basically said, ‘You hurt my sister and I’ll kill you.’”
Penny receives a lot of criticism. “Opinionated,” says Nicky. “Difficult,” says Judy. “Irritating,” says Stella, adding, “I suspect Penny was goading Rhoda or contradicting her. I could see it was going to explode. It was awful to witness. Penny was difficult, but Rhoda and Nicky could be as well.”
For her part, Penny compares the dynamic within the band to a blossoming romantic relationship. “In the early stages people are on their best behaviour, but as you get to know each other you feel freer and resentments come out. It’s ironic, since the whole idea of 2 Tone was to put differences aside and come together to promote a better society, that we couldn’t overcome our own differences.”
While not wholly absolving herself of blame, Penny points to other factors that ultimately split the band. “Rhoda had meltdowns,” she says. “She would just sit in a chair and scream. There was a lot of pent-up frustration in her. She had problems with me and SJ. She felt that we were privileged middle-class white girls who didn’t understand how things were.”
The social differences are what make the group such a fascinating study. Nicky’s parents owned a market stall in Soho; Rhoda’s father grew up surrounded by servants and worked in the music business. “My parents behaved as if they lived in a big house,” she says. “I was brought up to think of myself as someone who could expect everything and anything. I didn’t have the psychological or cultural restrictions of being working class.” SarahJane compares herself and Stella to Victoria Beckham. “We came from very well-educated backgrounds,” she says, “whereas Nicky and Jane were what I call street kids.”
Identifying a clear class divide, Rhoda postulates, “It was about: should we upset the neighbours or shouldn’t we? I slotted into the working-class ‘Let’s rock the boat.’ … They were all fucking ridiculously rich. Stella’s dad owned a plane … How they treated me was neither here nor there. It was where I wanted to be. I didn’t think any further ahead than getting on Top of the Pops. Once I’d done that, I didn’t really know what else to do. I kind of lost momentum. When they treated me badly or it was apparent that it wasn’t going to improve, I was gone.”
“The five of us wanted to evolve and not just play reggae,” says Stella. “2 Tone was coming to a natural conclusion. It couldn’t sustain itself. We wanted to expand our musical repertoire.” Rhoda dismisses such ambition deftly. “They wanted to be pop tarts,” she states. “All the 2 Tone bands used to scrap and squabble. Just because you’re in a band didn’t mean you got on with them personally. You were thrown together in this cramped goldfish bowl space. You let off all your steam on stage, came off and you have all this energy. Inevitably people are going to argue, they have a drink, and sometimes it’s all going to go horribly wrong.”
On Halloween night in 1980, the Bodysnatchers performed for the last time. It had been just 11 months since their debut at the Windsor Castle. Two hundred-plus gigs later, Penny says, “We were all mentally exhausted. It felt more like three years than 11 months. It had been super intense.” Playing a set consisting almost entirely of original songs, Record Mirror described the farewell appearance at the Music Machine as celebratory: “It’s quite obvious that most of the band are in the party mood. The Bodysnatchers certainly went out in a blaze of glory, buried under a sea of confetti, streamers, rubber string from a spray can, and Doc Martens, as the skinheads invaded the stage.”
“And that was the band over,” says Judy. Answering her own question – why did it end? – Miranda cuts to the quick: “Nicky left and Rhoda got wooed away to do stuff with the Specials. We then morphed into the Belle Stars” – who had big hits with Sign of the Times and Iko Iko – “so it didn’t feel like it was an end. We just adapted to the people leaving.” Rhoda sums up the experience with blunt analysis: “I’d played with the Specials. Then you come back to the Bodysnatchers and you think, ‘They’re so shit.’ It was a relief.”
• This is an edited extract from Too Much Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism and the Soundtrack of a Generation by Daniel Rachel, published 19 October by White Rabbit Books. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com.