When the past is a foreign country

It broke Fergus Linehan’s heart to leave Ireland, but working at the cutting edge of the Australian arts in the Sydney Opera House is ample reward, writes BRIAN O'CONNELL

Many venue programmers have a wish list of performers, but generally it remains just that. Linehan, however, knows that most artists will take his call. Linehan has been head of contemporary music at the Sydney Opera House for the past two years.

From 2006 to 2009, he was director of the Sydney Arts Festival, the first person from outside Australia to hold the post in its 30-year history. He brought the festival on to the streets through large outdoor performances and attracted major acts, including Brian Wilson, Grace Jones and Al Green.

As well as his post at the Sydney Opera House, he also runs Vivid Live, a music and arts festival based around the venue, which this year featured Florence and the Machine, Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs performing a lost album from 2005 as a “psycho opera”, and Sufjan Stevens with Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly playing a series of songs inspired by planets. The Australian newspaper recently named him among the top 50 most influential persons in the arts in Australia, and he currently divides his time between London and Sydney.

Linehan came to Australia after running the Dublin Theatre Festival from 2000 to 2004. The move to Sydney was something of an artistic release.

“Running the Dublin Theatre Festival, I was always so conscious of what had been done before. Brian Friel wrote a play for the festival and so it sometimes felt like you were carrying around Maud Gonne and everyone else. It was like being over-burdened with the past. Here, there is so little interest in the past. Everything is about what is coming next.

“The other thing I noticed moving here was that in Ireland there is a lot of contemplation and discussion around events. Fundamentally, we’re not as interested in the engineering of something. Here they want to get to the application, to pull up the flowers and see how the roots are growing as soon as possible.”

When Linehan returned to Ireland in 2009, having left near the peak of the Celtic Tiger years, he was immediately struck by the shift in national mood. The country was burdened not so much by the past any more, but by the present.

“I remember getting into a taxi at the airport with all my bags. It broke my heart a bit to leave Ireland in 2006, and now I was coming home. The taxi driver said to me in a heavy Dublin accent: ‘You’re coming home? Everybody is trying to get out of this place, did nobody tell you?’ I hadn’t lived in Ireland for five years and I came straight back into doing nothing. I stayed with my folks for four weeks and suddenly I was back in my bedroom listening to Joe Duffy. It was like the point at which the penny began to drop for the country and I was in the middle of it and thinking, sweet Jesus.”