One of the most remarkable events we have witnessed recently was last month’s Rogues Gallery concert at the Barbican, where talents as diverse as Shane McGowan, Martha Wainwright, Teddy Thompson and countless others, including non-musos Ralph Steadman and Tim Robbins, joined together to perform an array of sea shanties.

It was a remarkable night, that no other venue could have hosted. It is these one-off events have come to characterise this extraordinary place.

“The Barbican has a tendency to produce and curate shows that wouldn’t necessarily happen somewhere else,” says Media Relations Manager, Alex Webb. “A couple of years ago we had Tropicalia, which was a big hit. It was about 60s Brazilian pop music and at the same time there was an exhibition on here of the same thing, and that’s the beauty of the Barbican. You co-ordinate things with cinema, the art gallery and so on.”

That’s right, as well as the main concert hall, with its capacity of just under 2000, there is a theatre, a cinema, two art galleries, a lakeside terrace and three restaurants. It is, therefore, the largest multi-arts centre in Europe, and is renowned across the continent for its inspired programming.

The idea for the Barbican first emerged in the mid 50s as the post-war regeneration project for this part of town got into full swing, after being decimated by bombing during World War II. The area itself had a rich history before then too, with it being one of London’s hotspots for the plague in the 17th century, while Samuel Johnson once wrote of the Barbican area that is was “much inhabited by the writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems.”

In the optimism that pervaded the post-war years, many ideas were floated for this battered locale. In 1955 the plans for the Barbican were put in place, but it wasn’t until 1971 that construction work started on the complex, with both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra involved in the planning, which was headed up by the Corporation of London who subsidise the Barbican still. The Barbican officially opened in 1982.

Now, the next decade or so was spent securing a peerless reputation for cutting-edge classical music, with the contemporary music programme flourishing but not to the fore. Then current contemporary music programmer Bryn Ormrod took over in 1999 and shook the place up. In 2006 he was named as one of Time Out’s Top 100 Movers and Shakers in London.

“Like any of these things it took time to find its feet,” says Webb, “and from the point of view of contemporary music things started to take off when the current programmer, Bryn, took over about 9 years ago. We’ve always had a good classical programme but that was when it started to really find its feet in terms of putting on world music, jazz and the more experimental end of rock and pop.”

The events Webb cites as highlights are those that are distinctly strange and, as he says, are one-offs unlikely to happen anywhere else. In particular he cites audio-visual things, such as when the Pet Shop Boys came to do a live soundtrack to Battleship Potemkin or when Ornette Coleman did the same with Naked Lunch. “When you have the right hall with the right technical resources that kind of thing can be very effective,” says Webb.

The other thing the Barbican is known for, like its only really comparable London venue the Southbank Centre, is allowing the space to be controlled by “maverick artists using the freedom of a venue to curate what they want”.

Scott Walker takes over the Barbican for three nights in November, for performances of his Tilt and The Drift albums. The man himself, alas, will not be appearing.

Other upcoming shows at the Barbican include Alim Qasimov Ensemble and Kronos Quartet (26 September 2008), Domino Records Crystal Anniversary Event with Tricky, Wild Beasts and Skream (6 October 2008) and the great John Martyn (10 November 2008).

Where? Barbican Centre, Silk Street EC2Y 8DS 020 7638 4141
Web? barbican.org.uk
How? Barbican (Hammersmith and City, Circle, Metropolitan Lines)Buses 8, 11, 23, 26, 35, 42, 43, 47, 48, 55, 56, 76,78, 100, 133, 141, 149, 153, 172, 214, 242, 243, 271, 344
Founded? 1982
Atmosphere? Daring
Pint? £3.50