After stumbling over a stack of our tatty old tickets, it occurred to me the other day that I must have been going to gigs at Brixton Academy for almost twenty years and so I thought it might be interesting to try and plot a used ticket history of Brixton’s biggest and oldest live music venue.
After sorting through the assorted tickets, I’ve managed to cobble together tickets spanning from Dodgy in 1996 (when you could snap up headline show for £9.50) to The Chemical Brothers in 2005 (when the entry fee had jumped to £25)… here they all are then…
I clearly enjoyed my first outing to the Academy as a cider-fuelled sixteen year old in ’96 and returned a further five times in ’97 going Britpop crazy for the likes of Kula Shaka, Cast, Ocean Colour Scene and Supergrass.
Shed Seven, The Verve, Weller, Ashcroft…and in to a new millennium. I admit my musical taste wasn’t particularly eclectic back then. Sadly I don’t have any surviving tickets from 1999, so let us know if you’ve got any old tickets from the end of the century and we’ll add them in.
Not sure if this already exists anywhere else, but I thought it might be interesting to try and plot a history of Brixton Academy in old used tickets. The venue first opened as ‘Brixton Academy’ back in 1983 when Simon Parkes bought the venue for a quid. It would be great to see a gig ticket for every year since then.
Mine go up to 2005 with the Happy Mondays & The Farm, the last one of the pile (above). I’ve been back dozens of times since of course, I just haven’t bothered keeping the tickets anymore.
If you have any old Academy tickets that precede 1996 or follow on from 2006, please take a snap of them and ping them on to us at brixtonbuzz@gmail.com and we’ll try and cobble together a complete year-by-year Brixton Buzz history of gigs at the Academy. Won’t that be nice?