As a musician, I know why closing down the thriving Leadmill is a blow to all of Sheffield

I played there with my first band, Treebound Story, on my 17th birthday – 17 January 1984 – and this was long before health and safety, so we had about 1,200 people and they all sang Happy Birthday. I remember it as if it was yesterday.

There have been so many times like that: for me not just as a musician but as somebody who goes there to listen to music and meet up with friends and socialise. And then I played in 2022, to try to save the venue, after the management was given an eviction notice by the new landlord. We had Helen Sharman, the first British woman in space, and Jarvis Cocker, Self Esteem and Pete McKee – we played Bowie’s Space Odyssey. These kinds of venues, they take risks, cultural and financial risks, and they need protecting. This is true of venues all over the country.

Now the place has a new landlord; they’re going to kick out the old management. But the Leadmill is a thriving, multimillion-pound business generating a huge economic impact locally and nationally. I hope the prime minister reads this, because there should be some change to legislation to protect successful businesses like the Leadmill from what is daylight robbery.

When I was a kid I played blues there on my own, entertaining the old guys with paperbacks in their pockets and pints of Guinness and real ale in front of them. I was a runner for Nina Simone there. She wanted gardenias or orchids for her hair; and this was winter in Sheffield in the nineties! You might as well ask for a trio of giraffes. I met Graham Wrench there, my manager. I was 16 and he was 20 or 21.

The Leadmill has provided so much cultural nourishment, so much succour and so much fun for Sheffielders. The loss of a venue like this far, far outweighs any possible gains that a corporate company from another place could possibly understand or give to this venue.

Photograph by Giannis Alexopoulos/NurPhoto via Getty