The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 25

Arts IH A squatted lido in Brixton plays host to a counter-cultural cinematic experience Against the tide Sean O'Hagan for alternative ventures, coupled with the increasing distaste that many young creative film-makers feel for the mainstream, has produced weird and occasionally wonderful eruptions from the margins. The Exploding Cinema is a nonprofit-making venture, which stages regular smaller events at fixed venues, usually the upstairs room of a pub or cafe anywhere, in fact, that "subverts the normal cinema-going Their philosophy of "cinema for everyone" means that they neither censor nor edit nor even select films on any qualitative basis. Anyone can show up and have then-work screened, with the proviso that they must then be prepared to stand up and defend their images if the audience objects or disrupts the performance. "Ultimately," one of the Explosive subversives informs me, "the event is always more important than the films shown." This edict held through for Saturday's all-night extravaganza where most of the audience were content to move around from installation to performance to screening rather than sit too long before a passing parade of abstract short films that, after a while, would have tested the patience of even the most die-hard experimental cinephile. One of the notable exceptions was Richard Stanley's extraordinary Voice Of The Moon, a poetic 40-minute homage to Afghanistan's anti-Soviet rebel guerrillas that is part dreamscape, part docu-drama.

That a film as visually stunning and technically brilliant as this one has been confined to the margins speaks volumes about the commercial values that have all but strait-jacketed low-budget film-makers in this country. The Exploding Cinema will obviously ran and run for some time to come. As one of their slogans puts it, they have "no taste, no pretensions, no The Exploding Cinema are looking for a new venue. If you can help, ring 071 703 3912. Heads you win A man wearing a caricature head of Bono warms up the crowd at Parkhead stadium, Glasgow, on Saturday PHOTOGRAPH: IANWALOIE therapeutically over hundreds of stages and multi-million pounds or should you just go home? The night ends scrappily, with bad lights, poor choreography: Mac-Phisto suds into Elvis, groaning I Can't Help Falling In Love With You.

I'm tempted to take this coda literally: ultimately, all rock 'n' roll is bad Elvis, no matter how glittering or edifying the superstructure. It's a crucifying, crushing insight: and the inevitable U2 question, "What will they possibly do next?" may, I suspect, have a terminal answer. Lights out. huddle on the small stage in the audience, bouncing against each other as they play old hits, it should be a moment of spectacle-smashing intimacy. But it's just four awkward white boys, bearing riffs: vulnerable, not cutting it musically, clearly keen to get back to the safety of their steel-alloy thrones 50 yards away.

As for Bono's thespian-fag Mac-Phisto character it frankly feels like an aftershow bar routine that's been disastrously over-estimated. OK, so he's the opposite of the old tub-thumping Bono; but is that necessarily an interesting place to be? One gets a giddying flash of the real, tedious source of this: tired rocker, miles from base camp, pumping the hotel's cable channels for some human connection. Now, do you need art to work this lonely condition THERE was an eerie glow over Brixton's Brockwell Park lido on Saturday night and a series of strange noises emanating from within. Around 2,000 people, the curious easily outnumbering the faithful, gathered at a disused and recently-squatted outdoor swimming pool for the latest manifestation of the Exploding Cinema. When I arrived, there were strangely-clad men running around the changing room roofs with phosphorescent torches.

Down in the empty pool, a series of scratch video images were being projected on the wall at the deep end to an accompanying soundtrack of discordant music intercut with tape-looped human screams. I saw two policewomen enter the lido, look around in disbelief, and exit hastily. Despite the WPCs' discomfort and the indulgent nature of some of the more outre material on display, the poolside vibes of the attendant multitude were surprisingly mellow. This may have had something to do with the heavy aroma of reefer that hung in the air. This eventhappening was all the evidence anyone needed that the contemporary underground scene is alive and kicking against the mainstream with a vengeance.

The night's programme of independent film-making, performance art, installation and music was the latest episode in an ongoing experiment in cinematic mischief that began two years ago in a Brixton squat. Back then, the Exploding Cinema numbered less than a dozen disaffected independent film-makers, frustrated with Britain's mainstream and avant-garde film culture. The Exploding Cinema articulates a do-it-yourself philosophy that has its roots sixties American underground cinema and seventies punk rock. That said, it is definitely a mu tant offspring of the beleaguered nineties, where a critical lack of funding his -his is the second part of our three even in some of the grittiest string-writing. Otherwise it was a programme inspired by Italy, with Rossini's Turco in Italia Overture, Wolfs Italian Serenade and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony evoking warmth and sunshine, even if the 40-odd players in the Sinfonia had to work hard in so large a hall.

'J. gow which could have been excruciating bring this tottering cabaret down to its proper level. Before a live audience, U2 couldn't possibly be the blank cyborgs they constructed in the studio for the Zooropa album. If technology is a means to human emancipation, then U2 bless 'em turn out to be implicit propagandists for a radical democratised techno-culture. In the space between encores, selections from a video box opened to fans were beamed out, full screen.

And what about the music? "We're just learning these new songs," mumbles Bono. "So for fuck's sake don't clap along to this one." With their gleaming electronic cathedral behind them, sometimes U2 are revealed as the wobbly Irish garage band they essentially are. When they CLASSICAL RAHRadlo 3 PromHickoxWigglesworth Edward Greenfield THE Royal Albert Hall still has its drawbacks, but nothing equals it for wallowing in sumptuous sounds. Following up Elektra on the Proms opening night this year came the other horror-work of Strauss, Salome not the whole opera, just the closing scene, with Maria Ewing curdling our blood in her depiction of total depravity, as she did at Covent Garden. What did it matter that Mark Wigg-lesworth in his thrustful conducting had the BBC Symphony Orchestra drowning the singer occasionally? Maria Ewing's clear projection was what mattered, and orchestral sound wrapped around the audience as it never can in the Royal Opera House.

It felt as though one had just heard the whole work, and that was also thanks to having in preparation Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, a shrewd choice when Wigglesworth drew such concentrated, rapt, beautiful playing from the orchestra. His concentration was just as keen in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Helped by the most perceptive, informative programme notes from the scholar and composer, Gerard Mc-Burney one heard this most popular of the Shostakovich symphonies in a new, bigger and deeper context, with the controversial finale freed from any smear of bombast The Strauss in the previous night's Prom was far removed from Salome, the genial Oboe Concerto of the composer's glowing Indian summer. Sympathetically supported by Rich IT'S BACK day competition to win one of a hundred pairs of UCI cinema tickets. Just tell us if the scene below, taken from Clint Eastwood's latest film 'In the Line of shows a hero or villain.

Send all three answers to the address we'll print tomorrow and the first hundred correct answers will win the tickets. 'Guardian ard Hickox and the City of London Sinfonia, Nicholas Daniel played with a coaxing warmth and subtlety that nearly sustained the work's meandering length. After that it was welcome that Robert Saxton's Viola Concerto was so compact in its four sharply conceived and well-balanced movements. Paul Silverthorne was the masterly soloist, finding lyricism volcano THEATRE COMPANY L.O.V.E. BASED ON SONNETS By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE "mis wm go down as i'.

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