Every good festival needs a determined director, and if there’s one event that Alex Poots has been intent to stage for Manchester International Festival, it’s a Bjork show.

“I’ve been waiting 10 years for the right Bjork project to come along,” he laughs as we talk at the MIF offices in Manchester about Iceland’s most innovative musical export.

“Literally, I go from job to job asking her if we can work together.

“When the Royal Opera House did their first ever pop gig, that was with her and I brokered that deal. When I heard about Biophilia I sat down with her and said, ‘This project is amazing. You’ve been building it for three years, have you thought of a residency?’.

“She said she was worried we’d run a mile from that idea, but we wanted her to be here the whole time. Now she’s doing two shows a week and an education project with kids from south Manchester to work with her songs and her technology. You can do good work when you’ve got an artist there for that length of time. I haven’t yet met an artist who hasn’t fallen in love with the city because Manchester is giving them their baby; it’s giving them the opportunity to make what nobody else would.”

Written on a portable games console to inspire children to create music of their own, Biophilia is the world’s first ‘app’ album – apps that play as songs but also become art works and creative toys. It won’t be a run of the mill kind of gig. But it fits perfectly with MIF’s utterly beguiling approach to programming. The concept of a festival of entirely new work – commissioned and paid for through the festival itself – is a brave idea, but
MIF always complements that with a cast list of equally uncompromising names.

And it fits too with Alex’s own background. He’s a former director of contemporary arts at the English National Opera and has worked with the Barbican and both Tate Modern and Tate Britain art galleries. Softly spoken and endlessly convivial, he talks with relentless enthusiasm about MIF and the support the city has shown for him  since the first festival in 2007.

In fact, he believes Manchester is the only city that would have embraced the risks involved with staging a festival of untested, newly commissioned work. “People are getting used to letting Manchester go first,” Alex smiles.

“Tony Wilson always said, ‘Don’t talk about change. Just change and everybody else will catch up’.

“There’s a lot of exciting things happening in the city culturally. People should feel lucky to do something in Manchester because it’s a cool place to be. There is a pride in this city that wants to do things its way.

“When I set the festival up,” he says, “I said we should forget having it unless we could make it unique in the world.

“We realised Manchester could not only reclaim its historical place in the world as a place that makes things, but also the place that takes what it makes around the world.

“Everyone said I was mad because world premieres go wrong, but we’ve let the artists lead us and they’ve usually led us into fertile ground. When they weren’t quite right,” he laughs, “they still did it with a lot of chutzpah.”

Striving for acclaim this year alongside Bjork are Damon Albarn and director Rufus Norris, comedienne Victoria Wood, performance artist Marina Abramovic, Manchester’s Wu Lyf, Snoop Dogg, Sinead O’Connor, Johnny Vegas and Amadou & Mariam.

Theatre producers Punchdrunk (It Felt Like A Kiss) also make a welcome return with a children’s production. “If they had it their way,” smiles Alex, “no adults would be allowed in at all.”

Already, the 100,000 tickets on sale are flying out of the box office – and to more distant postcodes than ever. Over 30 per cent of the tickets for The Life And Death Of Marina Abramovic have been snapped up by overseas visitors; hoteliers, bar owners and even the high street are already preparing for the anticipated gold rush.

The festival now attracts more public and private co-commissioner investment than Edinburgh’s celebrated Comedy Festival – including £2m from the Manchester city council and a six-figure sum from the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in London – and entertains more than 250,000 people across the three weeks from June 30 to July 17.

And despite the loss of vital North West Regional Development funding, Alex says the budget for the festival is now over £10m. The council’s continued investment is a result of their long-term vision for the festival; MIF has become a cherished jewel in the portfolio of events the council supports.

“In the long term this was something they wanted to keep,” says Alex.

“Everyone said last time that the recession would hurt us. Although things are harder generally now, I have to believe that those special moments are still ones that people will want to have.

“That’s why we’ve always kept a third of the festival free; everyone should be able to have a special moment, irrespective of their income.”

What will Alex’s be? “Candi Staton in the New Testament Church Of God for Sacred Sites,” he smiles. “You’re gonna be up on your seats.

“I can’t wait for that!”

» MIF 2011 runs from June 30 to July 17. Log on to www.mif.co.uk/programme .

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