I bought Brixton Academy for £1

The Brixton Academy is one of London’s great live music venues. This 5,000-capacity space is both intimate and grand – its sloping floor ensuring all standing spectators can see the action taking place on the vast stage, its beautiful art deco surrounds framing each performance.

Legendary gigs have happened here for decades. Yet, back in 1982, it was a different story. The venue was bankrupt and had left the Watney Combe & Reid brewery high and dry for £120,000. The brewery wanted its money back.

Somehow, despite the six-figure asking price being way out of his reach, audacious 23-year-old Simon Parkes persuaded them to sell him this huge cultural venue for just £1.

“Brixton was a byword for danger and murder back then,” says Simon Parkes when we meet at Raw Material Music – a community music and creative arts centre in Brixton.

“That’s how it was portrayed in the press and perceived by the general public. The people of Brixton were solid, but it had such a bad rep.”

Originally opened as the Astoria Variety Cinema in 1929, the venue was converted into the Sundown Centre nightclub in 1972, but closed two years later. After reopening as rock venue Fair Deal in 1981 it went bust very quickly – so when Parkes rang the brewery expressing an interest, he could hear the shock in their voices – and knew he could buy it for less than the £120,000 asking price.

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“I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing, but I had just done accountancy and law at South Bank poly – didn’t finish, but I now had the ability to write a spreadsheet,” he says.

“I said, I don’t have the money, but here’s a business plan: we can do 200 concerts a year so I’ll be selling 2,000 barrels a year. If we do a 10-year beer deal, I can pay your £120,000 off against beer barrels in the first few years… so I’m going to pay you £1 up front.”

They went for it. But now Parkes had to persuade reluctant rock bands to come to Brixton.

“I remember a reggae artist called Eek-A-Mouse was one of the first that played,” he says.

“I don’t know how many people paid because most of the doors got kicked in. But it was a learning curve in the first year.

“No rock bands would come near the place and R&B acts like Luther Vandross wouldn’t play.”

Video may have killed the radio star around this time – but it also saved Brixton Academy.

“In the early 1980s there was a boom for high-budget video shoots – so AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” video was shot there, so was Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going” with Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny Devito, Wham! shot “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”. And bands like Dire Straits would do production rehearsals there ahead of stadium tours. So we had a high turnover,” Parkes recalls. 

Parkes won over the rock crowd with a heady mix of punk and politics. Brixton Academy always embraced the chaos.

“The Clash played Arthur Scargill’s Christmas Party in 1984 to raise money for presents for the kids of the striking miners,” says Parkes. “Other venues turned it down – people were watching police battle with miners on the TV news every night and The Clash were punk rock, so they thought it was a recipe for disorder. But we did five nights of The Clash. It still gives me goosepimples thinking about them opening the show with “London Calling” – that was the point I knew this venue was going to work. The energy and the atmosphere was mental.

“It was a very political era. We had The Smiths playing their last ever gig here for Artists Against Apartheid. Paul Weller played with The Style Council for a Nicaraguan Solidarity campaign. We had Anti-Nazi League shows. The Specials played here.

“And lots of hip-hop bands started to come in – I remember Public Enemy playing with guest speakers Reverend Jesse Jackson and Winnie Mandela. You are talking global names coming here. And that got everyone’s attention.”

Attention was precisely what Parkes craved for the venue. And he was happy to speak to anyone during this era of political change and upheaval.

“I had lunch with Mrs Thatcher,” he grins. “It was recognised that Brixton Academy was having a massive impact on an area that was considered very downtrodden. We were changing the neighbourhood and bringing money into the area.

“I took everyone at face value. And I immersed myself in the local community. So I wore different hats with the local police than I did with the gangsters – but they knew I would never grass.

“We used to confiscate drugs off people – and as an ex-concert goer, I’d see their little face go, ‘Oh, fuck, my night’s ruined.’ So I would grab the drugs, follow them into the venue, put it back in their hand and say: ‘Don’t take the piss, enjoy your evening.’

“The idea was that they will tell 20 mates that it’s a cool place. I also used to stand in the queue and listen to people talk. Women were going, I can’t drink too much because there’s always a big queue for the toilets. So we doubled the size of the ladies toilets.”

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Parkes describes giving work to young Johnny Lawes as the best decision he ever made. The two of them are at the heart of Brixton Calling – a new play based on Parkes’s 2014 memoir – which opens at Southwark Playhouse later this month and is punctuated by the music from the time.

“Johnny became one of my best friends. He was a Rastafarian guy who used to knock on the door every day saying ‘gissa job’. One day I said, what can you do for me? He said he could get any gig, so I sent him on a mission to get us UB40, who were huge at the time. They’d done a gig at Fair Deal and not been paid – so getting them would send a message that we were back.

“I even lent Johnny my car to go up to Birmingham. Two days later, I’m thinking, what have I done? How am I going to tell the insurance company I’ve given my car to a complete stranger? But three days later, he appears with a contract for UB40 to play here.

“Being with Johnny was the first time I really experienced out and out racism, because I’m walking around with a Rastafarian trying to get a cab or going into areas where he wouldn’t normally go. It was a very fast learning curve, and I became very sympathetic and outspoken about the way the media portrayed Brixton and the Black community.”

Parkes and Lawes ran things for more than a decade. But late nights and high times come at a cost. And in 1995, Parkes sold up.

“Once the rave scene started, every Friday and Saturday, we were going through to 6am. So I’m going home at 8am and I’ve got to be in the office by 12,” he recalls.

“Doing that 48 weekends a year was taking its toll. I didn’t take ecstasy because I’m in charge of 5,000 people – so I’m watching all these happy buggers dancing the night away while I’m feeling grumpy as fuck. like Victor Meldrew. I just wanted to go to bed.

“We’d achieved everything I set out to do. The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross – everyone was playing there. I was trying to get this festival off the ground with Nirvana and that crashed because of Kurt Cobain’s death and it knocked the wind out of me. I thought, I’m going to blink and I’ll be 50, still doing the same thing.”

Parkes still loves the area but, like many who were here during the 1980s and 1990s, feels it has changed beyond all recognition.

“It needed to change, but to me Brixton has overdone the gentrification,” he says. “It’s lost a bit of its soul. I went to the Lido yesterday and there wasn’t a black face there. A decade ago, it would have been a 50-50 crowd. Peckham and Brixton were once bywords for shit holes. Now no one can afford to buy anything around there.”

As for the live music scene, he retains his passion – and like many, has witnessed more and more independent venues closing. The Music Venue Trust continues to win support for a levy on stadium and arena shows to support the local music infrastructure in the UK.

“It’s very hard for a small independent venue to compete. It’s a bit like football – if all the money stays in the Premier League and doesn’t fund grassroots football, you’ll never win the World Cup. So if we don’t support small venues, our music scene will struggle,” he says.

“I think they need to get together collectively so when you talk to agents you are offering 20 gigs around the country – and the same with breweries. Collective bargaining for multiple smaller venues.

“But all governments need to look at the value of grassroots music and bands coming through – even just as a business model it is vital. These bands that went on to be mega in the 70s, 80s and 90s started at small independent venues. There used to be a proper ecosystem.”

Once upon a time, he says, record companies offered tour support for fledgling bands to traverse the country, learning their trade in smaller venues. They would build expertise and a fanbase that would buy their records. Some would end up at bigger venues. If it was going really well, they might even end up at the Brixton Academy. 

“And if you sold us out for two nights, you were destined for Wembley,” he says. “There was a rolling growth built in and that initial subsidy would result in a huge return in investment.

“Brixton Academy is now part of a giant corporation owned by Live Nation. Live Nation probably control 80 or 90% of the live music in the UK – they control Ticketmaster and TicketWeb, Viagogo, they represent agents.

“So it’s part of a giant well-oiled machine. But is it progress?”

Brixton Calling runs at Southwark Playhouse until 16 August.

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