Man who cool-ed the Barbican

Last time I saw Graham Sheffield, he had been bumbling in orbit around Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson up in the Barbican's roof-top party room.

All skinny, matt-black clad Manhattan cool, Lou and Laurie were shoulder to shoulder in a moment of interspousal congratulation after the London premiere of Moby Dick. Sheffield, by contrast, was faintly shiny and dishevelled, wearing a suit and coloured shirt, and exuding the kind of overt, uncool enthusiasm one would expect from a schoolboy whose rock 'n' roll heroes had just stepped down out of the posters onto his bedroom floor.

It must have been an awkward moment; here he was next to probably one of the most hair-sheddingly untouchable couples in the known world, knowing that they were there because of him. Not simply because he had invited them but because he had instituted the four-year plan of radicalisation without which he could not have thought about issuing the invitation in the first place.

A week later, back in the safety of his own office, Graham Sheffield is exuding a kind of brave little tailor bluster about the event, supplementing fond memories of Lou Reed popping the Veuve Cliquot backstage with the rather cheeky suggestion that, for all his detailed appraisal of the show, Mr Reed may not actually have, er, remained awake for the whole performance. We can allow him his naughtiness; for who, even five years ago, would have imagined Lou Reed popping champagne backstage at the Barbican as anything other than the weak punchline to a bad joke?

"I do feel like pinching myself at the idea that the Barbican seems to be fashionable; it seems to have transformed into somewhere which is buzzy and lively," he says, with a glow of achievement as he sips his coffee. "If people want to stand up and dance in the concert halls, now they can; five years ago they probably would have got frogmarched out and shot."

And stand up and dance they do; the concrete and polyester labyrinth of the Barbican Centre is now so wised up it even houses late-night alternative clubs, right there in the foyer, next to the audiences trickling out at the end of a virtuoso Shakespeare production.

Unsurprisingly, juxtaposition seems to be one of his favourite words. "It is all about juxtapositions - you try to move things around so that they have more impact because of what they are and what they represent, and that is true for the audiences too," he tells me. True to his word, Graham Sheffield has in some way been responsible for all of my more bizarre experiences in London's public arts spaces. From pogoing in the Royal Festival Hall and watching the encounters between the green-haired, grey-faced punks and the diminutive white-haired ushers during the Meltdown Festival (one of Sheffield's "juxtaposition" schemes back when he was at the South Bank Centre) to swooning alongside the rest of the audience to the sensuous

New York drawl of performance poet Dana Bryant on the RSC stage.

Given his mastery of Meltdown, Inventing America, Only Connect, and now BITE (Barbican International Theatre Experience), it would also be fair to assume that another of his favourite words is festival; after all, he seems to launch enough of them. For some reason, however, Sheffield seems to rather resent this suggestion. "I don't have a festival fetish, not really; I suppose there are very strong strands in the programme here like the jazz programme and education programme that I see as vertical strands, then across that I will pull horizontal strands. It doesn't always need to be a festival, it could be a collaboration," he bristles, before accusing me, in turn, of having a fetish for the word fetish.

I am not about to argue with him, even though, for the record, he really never can resist using the word festival when collaboration would do, even when the collaboration in question, like BITE, lasts for a full six months.

For, call it what he will, Sheffield's ability to work the longitudinal programming strands of a public arts space through with the lateral vision of special projects and crazy programming has had astonishing results.