BRIXTON CALLING

New play tells the story of the entrepreneur who bought Brixton Academy for a quid.

- By DL

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 bestseller. 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.

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