The swings from doom to euphoria are now so close together it seems that the mid wife is needed. From the end of one day when it looks like it can’t possibly be completed on time; no floor, no windows, no signs, to the morning of the next; solution, still looks ok, commissioned, it is hard to remember to breath.

Yoko Ono is coming back. 40 years after she first appeared at the Bluecoat in 1967 she will have a piece in the opening exhibition, Now Then, and will perform here in  April. When she first came she gave a world premiere of a piece called The Fog Machine. The Bluecoat was packed, which was odd because she was relatively unknown, but a rumour went round that John Lennon might be there.

Who would you ask to open the Bluecoat on March 15? This was the last question for the Head of Operations interviews last week and it was designed to see if people had a feel for the Bluecoat and the contemporary art scene. The range of answers was huge from ‘they must have integrity and a past connection to the Bluecoat’ to the cry for ‘the mightiest star we could find so that as their light shone on us we would be illuminated to the world’. The board is currently considering the question. Any good ideas?

Question: Captain Beefheart had the first show of his paintings at the Bluecoat, in which City is this gallery? This was the Mastermind question the other week that got me thinking about the Bluecoat as an arts space.

The Captian Beefheart show was years ago, the 1970s sometime and I’ve just gone to sofa cinema to rent the DVD about him that I think has the footage of him here at the Bluecoat. Anyway it is just one example of the long history the Bluecoat has of working with artists in an unexpected way. Working with artists outside their normal sphere, cross over work between art forms, or even work not clearly from one genre or another has always interested us.