Phil Mills finally speaks: the Leadmill boss fought back at this week's licensing hearing

Good afternoon members — and welcome to Thursday’s Tribune.

After the huge response to our piece on The Leadmill last weekend, we felt we had to update you on the showdown that took place in Sheffield Town Hall at the shadow licence hearing on Monday. I also wanted to take the time to assess the claims being made about Dominic Madden, The Leadmill’s landlord, which I didn’t have much room for in the previous piece.

Almost unrelatedly, please enjoy this (unverified) anecdote about Phil Mills, which I find very charming.

Your Tribune briefing

🚲 Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors have joined forces to reopen a road in Nether Edge to traffic. As discussed in our Monday briefing, councillors on the transport committee voted on Wednesday on the future of three active travel schemes set up last year. The Sheaf Valley and Crookes and Walkley schemes were passed as planned, but Archer Road in Nether Edge will be reopen. The move was greeted with dismay by Green councillors, who said the vote was a backward step and flew in the face of data the council had collected.

📻 The BBC have announced big changes to the local radio schedule in Yorkshire, as many slots are regionalised in the latest round of cuts. Current BBC Radio Sheffield breakfast presenter Toby Foster will present a new Yorkshire-wide drivetime show, while Ellie Colton will take his breakfast slot in South Yorkshire. Paulette Edwards keeps her local daytime programme, while current drivetime presenter Howie Pressman leaves the station after 17 years. Current South Yorkshire weekend breakfast presenter Cat Cowan will switch to a new county-wide show at the same times. The changes will begin sometime this autumn. For our piece on the cutbacks at BBC Radio Sheffield, click here.

🏡 An interesting and provocative piece in Now Then looks at a proposal that Chatsworth House should be made into a hub for climate activism. University of Sheffield architecture masters students Jin Ivy Yan and Shruti Satish say their ideas would see the stately home transformed into “a dynamic testing ground for dealing with current and urgent issues, such as the climate crisis and colonialism.” Even if you’re not convinced by their arguments, the students’ drawings for how the building could look under their plans are worth a look anyway.

Things to do

📺 In latest episode of the BBC Four series The Read, Christopher Eccleston reads A Kestrel for a Knave from Oldham’s Coliseum Theatre. The programme showcases readings of iconic British novels and this latest is the much-loved coming of age tale of a Barnsley schoolboy, who finds an escape from his brutal upbringing by looking after his pet kestrel. In this piece on the BBC website, Eccleston says watching Kes — Ken Loach’s film version of Barry Hines’ book — was “the most important cultural event of his life” and inspired him to become an actor.

🪩 Legendary indie club night Offbeat returns to the University of Sheffield’s Student Union this Friday, 22nd September, playing its usual mix of classic and current leftfield indie tunes, just in time for this year’s Freshers’ Week. Launched in 1997 by Gill and Christopher Stride, Offbeat was voted the UK's “Ultimate Indie Disco” in 2005, in a BBC 6 Music poll. For a nice explanation of just what makes Offbeat so special and popular, see this piece in Now Then.

🍂 Join Fran Halsall of Sheffield Woodland Connections for a guided walk in the Sheffield Botanical Gardens. Discover the gardens’ Victorian origins, looking at their design and layout, plus the planting that survives from, or was inspired by, the era. The tour will focus on the work of the designer Robert Marnock, much of whose work can still be seen today. The two-hour tour begins at the Dorothy Fox Centre, next to the toilets. Tickets are priced £5.

Phil Mills finally speaks: the Leadmill boss fought back at this week's licensing hearing

More than one person familiar with Phil Mills predicted there was absolutely no chance he would attend this week’s licensing hearing. No matter how important it was in his fight with the building’s owner, regardless of the fact his business seemingly offered to pay people to protest outside it, I was assured Mills — the current boss of The Leadmill music venue — would not be there. Even The Leadmill’s embattled landlord, Dominic Madden, was confident on this point.

It made sense. So far, Mills’ refusal to speak publicly has been the curious void at the centre of the Save The Leadmill campaign. That’s why, when a man who looked like he could be in his early seventies abruptly asked to say something about two hours into the almost four hour-long meeting, I initially refused to believe what I knew must be true. But The Leadmill’s general manager later confirmed it: this was he.

There are, Mills told those gathered in the town hall on Monday, “something like 70-odd” conditions on the licence for Electric Brixton, Madden’s flagship music venue in London. These conditions, imposed by that venue’s local council and other authorities like the police, force Electric Brixton to take extra steps to prevent crime, disorder and other unfavourable outcomes that could result from their late-night events.

“And still,” Mills argued, “there’s stabbings, there are rapes, there’s overcrowding — that’s with those conditions. How many [conditions] do you have to put on to get these people to comply?” The committee’s chair, Cllr David Barker, thanked him for his input. As for his question, “that’s what this committee has to consider.”

This week’s licensing hearing was Sheffield’s first real chance to ask: who is this Dominic Madden guy that wants to take over The Leadmill? And can we trust him to do it?