It’s 11pm on a Friday night — exactly an hour since Electric Studios, the venue that replaced the legendary Leadmill, opened its doors for the very first time — and a respectable crowd has already gathered on the dance floor. There’s five more hours left before the night ends and revellers still getting into the swing of things bop their heads as a young DJ called Harriet Jaxxon plays on what was once the Leadmill’s main stage. Next to me, a man high on the intoxicating rhythms of dance music — and possibly something else — struts back and forth in a small space at the back of the crowd. Upstairs, in the women’s bathroom, a girl who has been caught short plaintively calls for someone to pass some toilet paper under her cubicle door.
Which is to say, the long-awaited opening of Electric Studios, the event that the Save the Leadmill campaign once insisted would “kickstart a race to the bottom of a corporate barrel” for this city’s nightlife, is in every way a classic clubnight. I went to hundreds, if not thousands, of nights like this as a student. If I was here with friends — rather than on my own and stone-cold sober — I could imagine having a decent time, although I’m not a big enough fan of D&B to have been willing to pay £15.60 for an early-bird ticket. (A final release ticket would have set me back £20.20.)
So far, the response to Electric Studio’s first offering to Sheffield seems very positive. “Amazing night,” reads one five-star review on the ticket sales website Skiddle. On X, another attendee writes: “Fucking love it. Finally summat decent from Electric Studios.”
Finally indeed. Depending on how you slice it, Friday’s party was an event that took seven months, four years or an entire decade to come to fruition. It’s been seven months since the venue known as The Leadmill finally quit the former flour mill on Leadmill Road, although not before stripping out everything they could, including the doors and half of the frieze above the front door. It’s been four years since Dominic Madden, the owner of Electric Studios and the Leadmill’s former landlord, told the venue he would not be renewing their lease, kicking off a years-long legal battle over whether he should be allowed to run his own venue in the building. And it’s been a full decade since Madden bought the building for £600,000, after it failed to sell at auction twice. At the time of the sale, The Leadmill Holdings Ltd — a company owned by Leadmill owner Phil Mills — had net assets in excess of £1.8 million, meaning the venue could theoretically have purchased its own home. For whatever reason, it did not.
When it was launched in 2023, the Save the Leadmill campaign attracted a huge swell of public support, while painting a very dim picture of Dominic Madden. More than 46,000 people signed a petition calling on the government to suspend the section of the Landlord and Tenant Act being used to evict The Leadmill Ltd (they declined to do so). In September of that year, a crowd of supporters gathered outside Sheffield town hall, as the council considered whether to offer Madden a license for the venue he one day hoped to run, urging them to refuse. At the meeting, Leadmill supporter Matthew Renshaw described Madden as a “vulture capitalist” who posed “a credible threat to the area”. (The council, unconvinced, granted the licence.)
When we meet the day before Electric Studios’ opening night, Madden is keen to put all the acrimony behind him. “The drama of The Leadmill is done and dusted really,” he insists. At first, he’s even hesitant to be interviewed for this piece, concerned it might extend the “Punch and Judy show” that has been going on between him and Mills for so many years. “All that seems like ancient history,” he says. “I think people will wake up in a year’s time and think ‘what was all that fuss about?’” He’s excited for the future, pleased with the programme of events they have coming up — some shows have already sold out — and “thrilled with the building,” which he says he has spent £1.6m refurbishing.
The Leadmill, however, is not yet ready to call it quits. On 25th February, the business launched “The Leadmill Relocation Fund,” aiming to raise £30,000 in donations from the public to help buy a new building and fit it out. “This isn’t about starting over — it’s about continuing something that Sheffield helped build,” a spokesperson said. “The address may change, but the purpose stays the same: bringing people together through culture, music and creativity.” So far more than 400 supporters have collectively donated almost £9,000, receiving only a “digital thank you” in return.
Unlike in 2023, when the people of Sheffield seemed overwhelmingly keen to Save the Leadmill, the online response to this campaign appears quite negative. “I used to love going to the Leadmill, but it was a business,” a commenter wrote, beneath a news article about the fundraiser. “I occasionally shopped in Debenhams, but I wouldn't expect them to start up a crowdfund so they can open a new shop in town.” Multiple people suggested The Leadmill should have used the money it spent on the protracted court case against Madden to relocate, while others argued that the people of Sheffield had already funded The Leadmill in the decades when it was still a charity, through the public grants it received. More to the point, even if The Leadmill hit their target, some failed to see what difference £30,000 would make. “That would not fund the opening of a small wine bar,” one commenter argued.
This is also the view of John Redfearn, the man who dreamed up The Leadmill in the 1970s. He says he doesn’t wish Mills “any ill will” but feels that, if he wants to start a new venue, he should do it “on his own steam”.
As another Leadmill founder Chris Andrews previously told The Tribune, Redfearn’s original goal for the building was to create a non-profit community arts centre that was “not for middle-class or rich people, but for working-class people”. It’s something Redfearn still thinks Sheffield needs today, although it’s not what he feels The Leadmill became once Mills took over in the 1990s and turned it from a charity into a private business. After that, he tells me, it was “just another nightclub”. Adrian Vinken, the man who ran The Leadmill charity at the height of its success in the 1980s, describes the fundraiser as “particularly cheeky”, adding that Mills perhaps “shouldn’t have spent so much on demolishing and removing the original venue’s interiors” before he left.
What Redfearn would most like to see, he tells me on the phone, is for Electric Studios under Madden to become something more like the original Leadmill — not just a home for popular gigs and club nights, but a space “all about creative energy”. As we wrote in our original article on the Save the Leadmill campaign, the 1980s Leadmill provided space for a theatre company, a dance company and multiple floors of studios, offered to local artists for little or nothing. The idea, Redfearn told me then, was that exciting new projects could form “just by people meeting at The Leadmill and having time to talk to each other.” In a similar vein, Chris Andrews tells me that he hopes Madden “finds it in himself” to use his profits from Electric Studios “to support local community art in the spirit of the original Leadmill”.
It’s been about two and a half years since we published our first article on The Leadmill — a piece that introduced many people to the fascinating history of this building and, in my view, contributed to a shift in public opinion about the Save the Leadmill campaign. That article was a months-long labour of love on my part, which involved tracking down the original founders and spending hours going through a binder of decades-old documents. Work like that wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t have slightly obsessive tendencies, but it would also be impossible without financial support from our readers. If you’ve learned something about The Leadmill from our work, and if you’d like to ensure we can subject its successor to similar scrutiny, then please consider joining today.
According to Madden, reviving some of the original Leadmill spirit is absolutely what he intends to do, albeit as a private company rather than a charity. Electric Studios, he tells me, will be an institution of two halves. “There’s the touring standard, professionally operated music venue downstairs, which is what we’re used to doing anyway. But then the really interesting space is upstairs.”
Frustratingly, he won’t reveal many of the plans for upstairs just yet. “There are projects coming along which I can’t talk about, but they reflect the Leadmill’s original spirit as an arts space.” He’s so nervous I might leak what’s coming, in fact, that even me putting the pen I’m using to make notes down on the table isn’t reassuring enough. At one point, jokingly, he seizes my reporter’s pad and holds it protectively over his head. “A lot of things will come to fruition in September,” he assures me. “These first few months are a bit of a soft launch to get the building on its feet and get people in to see and enjoy it.”
One thing he does commit to is that, like the 1980s Leadmill, Electric Studios will be offering studio spaces to local artists, entirely for free. In April, applications will open for artists under 30-years-old, who will be allowed to use the space for two years before moving on. “That won’t just be for musical artists — we’re open to visual artists, actors, wigmakers, anybody and everybody. We want a space that’s got an energy about it and the way we do that is by bringing in different tribes of people.” Artists will have to upload examples of their work and come in for an interview to secure a spot, with a local panel deciding who to accept. “It’s about getting the right personalities to use it,” Madden says. “What we don’t want to do is get a lot of people who don’t commit to it and just come in once a week to plug their laptop in.” The decision to focus on younger artists, he adds, “came out of conversations with some of the original founders, because one of the things they felt was a big success was making creative opportunities for young people”.
It’s not something Madden has done in his other venues in London, Newcastle or Bristol. When I point this out, Madden insists that’s partly because his other buildings are auditoriums and “don’t really have the space to put in studios or quasi-charitable uses”. His goal for the refurbishment was to bring the entire building, parts of which he says were “semi-derelict” when he took over, back into use. “The most important thing is that the space is used, it’s vibrant and that the city gets the best out of it.”
Is it also, I muse, out of a desire to foster goodwill, given the accusations that the Save The Leadmill campaign flung at him? Absolutely not, he insists. “People would see through that. We’ve not sat down and strategised about how to neutralise someone in Rotherham who doesn’t like me because they read the Star in 2022 and think I’m some kind of Satanist.” If the studio idea doesn’t quite hit the mark, he adds, then he’ll think of another use for the space. “It’s got to complement other good work happening in the city. There’s no point just doing something for the sake of it.”
Could he have done more, I wonder, if the battle to evict The Leadmill hadn’t been so long and costly? He tells me he spent over half a million in legal fees. “I don’t think the additional cost of the litigation has changed our approach,” he says. “In fact, it probably meant I was more determined to make sure this was a resounding long-term success. I’ve spent 99% of my time focused on this for a number of years.”
A big part of the Save the Leadmill campaign, as it was pitched to the people of Sheffield, was that Electric Group moving in would mean what was once a quirky independent would be replaced by “a big corporate organisation that doesn’t understand music,” as Madden puts it. “There was a narrative presented that I was some evil Illuminati type, who was all about creating a chain of venues.” He’s happy to admit that he bought The Leadmill building, all the way back in 2016, because he had hoped to expand his business outside of its flagship location in London. At the time, he had yet to open his second location in Bristol.
As he sees it, there’s nothing nefarious about this. His thinking, he explains, was that by “offering artists a number of spaces around the country” which they could book for a single tour, he would be able to entice the best possible acts to play his venues. “What I find is that, the more venues you operate, the more you are at the centre of decisions being made about artists touring. If you have four venues, then everyone in the know needs to talk to you.” As The Tribune reported last year, Sheffield has for some years struggled to attract major artists, compared to other cities in the north. “The exciting thing,” Madden says, “is we’re bringing in the kind of acts that have not necessarily played in Sheffield before.” He adds that part of the reason he wanted to buy a venue in Sheffield was in the specific hopes it would complement a sister venue in Bristol. “There’s a cultural leyline between Sheffield and Bristol, they have similar musical scenes,” he says. “Once we made [the Bristol venue] SWX a success, it became much more certain that we could make this a success.”
Does this mean that if SWX, which opened in 2022, had proven to be a flop, he might have been happy to let The Leadmill stay put? “It’s an interesting hypothetical,” he says. “Certainly, we would never have sold the building.” In the end, he decides he doesn’t want to comment on whether he might have continued to act as The Leadmill’s landlord — “I don’t think that’s helpful” — although, once he made up his mind to open a Sheffield venue, he’s clear that nothing Mills did could have budged him. “I’m not going to get bullied,” he says. Looking back, he doesn’t think there’s anything he would have done differently. “I found it all quite interesting, engaging in a quasi-judicial process,” he says. “It’s good for the soul and good for the brain.”
This is in stark contrast to how The Leadmill’s supporters felt about the situation, something the campaign once described as nothing less than a “battle for the soul of Sheffield”. On the day the Leadmill finally quit the building last summer, Madden tells me he received an email from a member of Leadmill staff, informing him that he’d ruined her life. “Of course, people should be proud of the legacy and the work they did,” he says, “but we have all got to get on with our lives.”
Frazer Spooner, a 27-year-old former Leadmill employee who took voluntary redundancy last year, tells me that he and his former colleagues were “just really young people in a pressure-cooker environment[...] that made us very susceptible to believe whatever we were told”. Though he spoke against Madden at the licensing meeting in 2023 and “genuinely believed” the speech he gave at the time, he has since changed his mind. “When I look back now at what I wrote, I can’t believe how cloudy my vision was.”
Madden, he says, “seems like a lovely fellow” and “it’s clear his vision for the building isn’t as apocalyptic as it was made out to be”. He’s particularly pleased to see that a lift has been installed, making the building fully accessible for the first time. In hindsight, he adds, the campaign took on a “weird pseudo-political” tone. “There was all this talk of ‘we are the working-class leftwing Leadmill up against this greedy landlord’ when, actually, it was that our millionaire lost to their millionaire. They used to call people ‘scabs’ if they were willing to go to the new venue, it’s as if we were at Orgreave or something.”
Madden, however, wants to focus on the positives. “There was a period at the beginning where we were presented as something we’re not but, once I started meeting people in Sheffield, the only thing I received was massive positivity and warmth.” Even at the height of the Save the Leadmill campaign, he alleges, “there were a lot of people coming to me privately, saying ‘this is not representative of the city’.” Despite this, he’s keenly aware that he has something to prove, which he says is inevitable whenever you launch something new. “Whatever you’ve done, however many times you’ve done it and however well-respected you are, there’s always a certain British sense of humour about whether you’ll open on time,” he says. “You have to get it open first and then the confidence builds once you do. The work has to speak for itself.”
