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.

The secret to a successful capital project is all in the planning. With a bit of dead time available from Christmas to New Year I slotted in a serious dose of man-flu and rounded it all off with the norovirus. It felt right to get the whinging and the moaning, of which there was plenty, over before the start of ’08. Yes, the big year has arrived. It seems a bit weird to be here, and perhaps we should remember now all those who set out on the journey but fell by the wayside.

The year has started with another review of the new Bluecoat this time in Architectural Review. This in the words of Hans, our architect, is a ‘world player in architecture land’, (which really is a weird parallel universe) and they have raved about the building, noting how it stands out from the crowd of all the other developments in Liverpool. The article ends with the comment that ‘you don’t have to shout to be heard ……the building proving the power of understatement.’ This should be a good contrast to my screaming from the roof tops about how amazing the new building is.