A play based on the story of a young man who bought a derelict cinema for just one pound and turned it into one of London’s most prestigious music venues opens at Southwark Playhouse Borough on July 23.
Simon Parkes was just 23 in 1983 when he stumped up a quid in an audacious deal that led to the birth of Brixton Academy. What makes the tale even more remarkable is that Parkes, a Thalidomide baby born with only one arm, had no background in entertainment nor any investors behind him.
He spent 15 years painstakingly building the Academy, previously an old Victorian beer hall located in a rough, politically charged area of South London, into a venue of legends, its stage welcoming the cream of the music world, including Page & Plant, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Brian May and Ozzy Osbourne.
Parkes learned most of what he achieved on the fly, and his memoir Live At The Brixton Academy: A Riotous Life In The Music Business was full of tales of brushes with gangsters, drug dealers, police stings and, at the other end of the spectrum, tedious council bureaucrats.
Following publication in 2014 it became a best-seller. When a copy fell into the hands of a writer and producer named Alex Unwin, the seeds of the play, Brixton Calling, were sown rapidly. Within months of a meeting with Parkes in a pub in Brixton – where else? – Unwin had written the play, brought in the Olivier-nominated director Bronagh Lagan and booked a run of performances at the Southwark Playhouse Borough, located just 15 minutes from the Academy itself.
Talking to Classic Rock, Parkes, who left the Academy in 1997, is thrilled by the prospect of the production, as well as being slightly nervous at being thrust back into the spotlight again. He had just met Max Runham, the actor and musician who plays him in Brixton Calling, although rehearsals were still to commence. “Like me, Max has one arm,” he marvels. “I was shocked that besides acting he also plays guitar – I’m not even sure how he does that.”
The play includes many songs by well-known bands that played the Academy, and Parkes reveals that its content is coloured by the era’s political nature. “One of the events that first put us on the map was five nights from The Clash, who were raising money for [union leader] Arthur Scargill’s Christmas parties for striking miners,” he explains. “In the early days we booked a lot of reggae before being in a position to break into [the market for] rock bands. The play follows those changes.”
What followed is what the press release terms a “white knuckle ride” that, along the way, included Parkes having a gun thrust into his face. “I went in there very naively, but with an enormous amount of enthusiasm,” Parkes admits. “I had no idea of what Brixton was like as a place, and in a way that helped. When gangsters hustled me, talking in riddles, I showed no fear because I was unaware of what was going on.”
Among his greatest early coups was persuading the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play the Academy during a time when no British agencies would take Parkes seriously. So he flew to Los Angeles and told the band’s management that his venue was 10 minutes away from Buckingham Palace (which technically is true, if calculated as the crow flies, across Victoria Park).
Recalling how he became involved with the Academy, Parkes tells of meeting with its owners, a brewery who sought £120,000 to sign it over. “The place had been shut for two years after reopening briefly as The Fair Deal, but it was in bad shape,” he says. Armed with a spreadsheet that proposed using beer sales to cover the venue’s costs, he convinced the brewery to accept a down payment of one pound, plus 10 for every barrel of beer sold.
“Over my tenure with the place, I think we sold seven million pounds worth of beer,” he says, adding with a grin: “They loved me”.
Purchasing the venue’s lease allowed Parkes to put on bigger and bigger shows, However, there were dips along the way, including a personal bankruptcy when the bank foreclosed on him around the time of the Gulf War in the early 90s. “We lost a lot of bookings, and they panicked,” he sighs. “I ended up losing my house. But I was young and single, and given the chance I’d do it all again.”
Following a run that included Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, Parkes sold up in 1997. The Academy had additionally begun putting on raves, which wasn’t his cup of tea. When plans for a summer music festival were unexpectedly torpedoed by the suicide of Kurt Cobain, Parkes admits: “I had achieved everything I could with the venue, and after the festival collapsed, so did my enthusiasm. I hung up my boots.”
Long after Parkes had departed, the Academy made headlines for all of the wrong reasons. It was shut for 16 months after two people died and others were injured during a crush in December 2022. “The whole thing was tragic, as people lost their lives, but I’m glad that the venue wasn’t closed down permanently, as I believe that it changed Brixton for the better,” he says. “And besides, too many live music venues are shutting their doors.”
It has been reported that the UK now loses a grassroots venue every fortnight. “It’s all very shortsighted, as live entertainment generates a significant amount of money for this country, which is also exported across the world,” Parkes points out.
“The play is flattering, and there’s a real hope that it will do well,” Parkes concludes. “There’s even talk of it being moved into the West End – even to Broadway, apparently.”
Brixton Calling runs from July 23 until August 16 at Southwark Playhouse, with shows Monday to Saturday at 7.30pm, and also Tuesday and Saturday at 3pm. Tickets can be booked online.
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