Alastair Upton, Chief Executive at the BluecoatYoko 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. She had only met him once by then and so I’m not sure how the story came about but Granada TV filmed the event and there was what we would now call a celebrity audience. Mike McCartney was there that night and the other day he told me how amazing it was and that he still has a ‘box of smile’ made by Yoko that John Lennon gave to him.

This is obviously the big media story for our opening arts programme. At our programme launch on Thursday we announced the arts programme for March, April and May. Maura our literature programmer, Sara our curator and Richard our performance programmer, all ran through what we will be doing.

One issue we have is that much of what we do is the new and experimental. This doesn’t work for most media as they want stories that their audience can identify with. So Yoko gets the headlines and then we have to do two things, get the media to extend their coverage to the rest of the programme and encourage people who pick up on this into our website and onto the rest of the programme.

Maura has the same set up with Jeanette Winterson and Tom Paulin , huge literary figures, performing on the opening weekend and they will attract in people, on line and on the day, who can then see the range of speakers and events we have.

The other trick, which obviously takes time, is building trust with the audience so that people come for things they know and from this appreciate the programmers taste and expertise and take a chance on things they aren’t familiar with.

The was the start of this as Maura, Sara and Richard’s enthusiasm and knowledge will was on show. In fact it had already started last week at the launch rehearsal during our staff meeting. Most of the office already want tickets for Beardyman . Look him up on youtube here .