If you love a true story and good music, this is the show for you
Alex Urwin’s Brixton Calling ticks off three boxes for me: a true story, good music and South London, so I have been looking forward to seeing this play adapted from Simon Parkes’ memoir of how he blagged his way to the top of the live music food chain when he bought Brixton Academy for £1, writes Michael Holland.
Simon (Max Runham) bounces on stage to a soundscape of cool guitar and introduces us to his posh schooldays as the son of a family rich from fish. He didn’t fit in at school so spent a lot of the time fighting bullies. He also didn’t fit it in at home, resenting the life-plan mapped out for him: school, work experience on the family’s fishing boats and in their fish factories, then business school in readiness for taking over the firm.
Of course, the young Simon rebels, runs away to see Chuck Berry playing live in London and pretty much decides he wants to be in the capital watching live music for the rest of his life: ‘F*ck the fish,’ he cries, ‘I wanna be in London!’
Simon becomes a party animal, taking everything going and washing it all down with alcohol. He says he has been chucked out of every decent music venue while living a life crowdsurfing between mosh pits.
One day he sees the decrepit, dilapidated, abandoned 1920s’ Astoria cinema in Brixton but can see beauty in its architecture. He tracked down the building’s owners and guardians, and offered to take this money-eating monster off their hands for the princely sum of £1. Simon had ideas to get it up and running as a place that he couldn’t get thrown out of.
This audacious boy of 23 had no money but he did have chutzpah, and with the help of a local boy, Johnny Dawes (Tendai Humphrey Sitima), went on to create one of the world’s greatest music venues.
This is when Brixton Calling turned up the dial to 11 and rushed us through the next years when the two friends stood up to promoters who wouldn’t book their bands south of the river, lowlife locals who couldn’t earn a pound on their own but in numbers tried to bully the boys out of their earnings. Death threats, tear gas and bomb scares were a regular occurrence, but they never gave up, forever pushed onwards and upwards, always thinking of ways to get music played live in Brixton. They needed good security and got it in the form of ex-military men and an Irishman with no surname.
Johnny Dawes talked UB40 into doing a gig, but most managers only saw Brixton as a place with a higher murder rate than The Bronx. Simon began selling it as a place to rehearse ‘just 15 minutes from Buckingham Palace’. Some of the best did want to rehearse there so Simon and Johnny would get their own private shows by the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Clapton and Dire Straits. Slowly the venue became a place that bands wanted to be in once it was recognised for its ‘great acoustics’. The Clash, Blondie, Dylan, all played there. Hawkwind recorded their magnificent Space Ritual album there. Springsteen came, saw and conquered. U2 began life there, The Smiths played their final show at Brixton Academy.
Runham and Sitima take us tripping through the rave scene and Acid House and all-nighters by The Chemical Brothers, accompanied by rock ‘n’ roll, reggae, soul, hip-hop, dance and punk music from two performers playing both instruments and everyone they ever met, faced down or done a deal with.
Brixton Calling is a tale of a chancer. A music-loving chancer and a friend who always thought they could do something if they tried. They tried and they succeeded by winning venue of the year twelve times and eventually sold up at a 2,500,000% profit…
If you love a true story and good music, then this is the show for you.
PS. Simon Parkes did all this with one arm and Max Dunham re-enacted that fantastic story with one arm also.
Southwark Playhouse Borough until August 16th.
Booking and full details: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/brixton-calling/
Link to the book: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/315325493050
