Everyone alive in 1996 could not escape the craze that was the Macarena. From clubbers to kids, the world was hooked by the annoyingly catchy track.

But, eighteen years on can anyone actually remember who wrote it?

Los del Rio’s one mainstream hit has a bizarre history. Inspired by a frisky flamenco dancer that reminded the duo of the saucy past of Mary Magdalene, the track was initially a folksy number when first released in 1994. It was not until the Bayside Boys released a bilingual remix and threw together a hypnotic set of dance moves that the song became, according to one 2002 survey, the “greatest one hit wonder” of all time.

Their follow-up single was a bizarre Christmas sequel of the track. By sequel, I mean that they occasionally shouted “joy to the world” and added a couple of bizarre cat sound effects.

Los del Rio have released eight albums since 1996, and although none have been particularly successful, who needs success when the Macarena earned the duo $250,000 in 2003 alone?

Kate Tempest, Friday, 6pm O2 Academy Oxford

Touring after the release of her wildly successful album, Everybody Down, rapper-cum-poet-cum-spoken word artist Kate Tempest comes to Oxford’s O2 with her own brand of politically charged, anger-driven hip hop. From open mic nights on Carnaby Street to collaborations with Scroobius Pip, Tempest has finally cemented her niche in the public’s consciousness.

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The Five & The Prophecy of Prana, Friday – Saturday, 7pm Oxford Playhouse

This award winning dance show fuses hip-hop, martial arts and Japanese Manga. Set in modern Tokyo, The Five & The Prophecy of Prana follows five troublemakers sent to a rehabilitation camp for young offenders run by the Grand Master of a secret group of warriors.

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Reggae Night @ Cellar, Friday – Saturday, 10pm The Cellar

Reggae night takes over Oxford’s most underground nightclub as DJ Bunjy and MC Joe Peng join Count Skylarkin on the decks, spinning big and bouncy reggae, dancehall, hip hop and drum & bass till the small hours.

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Urban Playground Workshop, Saturday, 10.30am Pegasus Theatre

What better way to spend a Saturday morning than learning how to walk on walls. Urban Playground give you the chance to try out some exciting parkour techniques under their guidance on the set of their production Run This Town. Niche, but fun.

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Drama Cuppers, All week, 12-9pm Burton Taylor Theatre

Come and watch the freshers try their hand at drama in this week of competitive intercollegiate theatre. These 30 minute performances are sure to range from the pretentious to the downright wacky.

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Hermitage Revealed, Tuesday, 6.30pm Phoenix Picturehouse

Two hundred and fifty years old this year, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is one of the largest and most visited museums in the world, holding more than three million extraordinary artefacts and exquisite masterpieces in stunning architectural settings. This film takes a closer look inside at some of the most expensive and best guarded artworks in Russian history.

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Why Film Matters, Tuesday, 6pm Ashmolean

As part of the Why Philosophy Matters series, New College’s Professor Stephen Mulhall talks about the hot topics in contemporary culture and philosophical thought. Free, no booking required, seats allocated on a first-come first-served basis, drinks from 5.45pm.

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Pitcairn, Tuesday – Saturday, 7.30pm Oxford Playhouse

1789. The year of the French Revolution and the infamous mutiny on the HMS Bounty. Rebellion and new ideas of democracy are in the air. With salty humour and growing horror, multi award-winning writer Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors) charts the colony’s descent from a new Eden to brutal dystopia.

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It has been said that Neil Cowley is the most listened-to pianist on the planet. This is a hard claim to argue with: In 2011 he was invited to play piano for Adele’s album 21, which went on to sell millions of copies across the globe. “Adele is one of life’s one-takewonders,” Neil reminisces. “She nails it pretty much every time, which is one of the reasons she deserves the success she has enjoyed.”

Clearly, then, Neil is a highly accomplished studio musician. Where he has really made his mark, however, is in the world of Jazz and Funk. His band, the Neil Cowley Trio, have an up-beat, jazz-meets-rock vibe that has earned them impressive album sales and a hectic European touring schedule.

Yet such success didn’t come easily. An early duo effort called Fragile State ended in disaster in the early 2000s when their record label went bust, taking Neil’s money with it. “It was time to make a change,” he says. “I gave Evan a ring, [the trio’s drummer] and along with an old flat mate of mine on double bass we recorded our debut record in about two days.” The result was the band’s debut album Displaced, which went on to win Best Album at the BBC Jazz Awards. “It was at that point that we realised we might be on to something,” he confesses wryly.

The trio’s sound is difficult to categorize. The combination of catchy melodies and driving, rhythmic chords lends the music a rocky, lean edge: “ It’s a band that looks like a Jazz Trio [piano, double bass and drums] but sounds more like it has absorbed every genre of music it can get it’s hungry little hands on”, enthuses Cowley.

While the band is best known for it’s “rifftastic, hooky” melodies, as he puts it, they also have a more intimate side. Their slower numbers have a touching poignancy and thoughtfulness — explored to the full in their latest release Touch and Flee. Cowley says, “One of the things we had started to enjoy at our concert hall gigs were the longer passages of melody and development. The consensus was that we wanted to create truly contemporary concert hall music.”

‘Kneel Down’, the first track on the album, has a dark, nostalgic feel. Neil’s piano improvisations, drenched in reverb, soar over the minimal bassline. The music is suspended in time and space, the only hint of forward movement provided by Evan Jenkins’ sensitive drum-work. Building to an emotional climax about four minutes in, the music dies away, leaving the piano line to fade slowly into the distance.

“I heard it said that as a musician you always end up returning to your roots,” muses Neil, as I ask him about his early life as a musician. In his case these roots were classical ones. Having performed a Shostakovich piano concerto at the age of 10, he abandoned a potential career as a classical pianist to focus on R&B and funk. “I had no intention of becoming a professional musician… I found parts of my musical education gruelling as a child” he explains.

“Aged 14, a soul/RnB band appeared in my world. All the guys in the band were in their mid twenties and they gave me my first gig, introduced me to James Brown and everything beyond. The addiction was immediate and it was a world of music that I chose, rather than something being forced down my throat.” He is keen to stress, however, that his early training as a classical pianist has been a helpful influence on his Jazz career. “I love the sense of space and drama that my classical training continues to inject into my compositions… that definitely comes through in my music”.

So what plans does Neil have for the trio over the coming weeks and months? “A new album for sure” he says. “Also we’re going to be touring Touch and Flee extensively throughout 2015: we’re currently looking at an Australian tour for early next year!”.

It looks like we might be hearing a lot more of the world’s most listened to pianist. It’s alright for some.

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

I was staying in the Castello district of Venice with a very friendly Italian man named Nicola when Simple Minds first surfaced in my musical consciousness. In between Nicola’s breathless stories of Venetian life he would recount at length the time that Simple Minds’ frontman Jim Kerr visited him — complete with excited gesticulations at the photo of them together on the hotel wall.

Other, admittedly older, couples nodded with enthusiasm whilst we wore rather confused expressions and shot each other “who are Simple Minds?” looks. This anecdote sums up the Glaswegian group: successful in the ‘80s, somewhat irrelevant today.

Nonetheless, I was willing new album Big Music to be good, I really was. Each track opens strongly, raising expectations. But the songs then quickly fade into the lyrically corny choruses, barely distinguishable from the lacklustre verses into which the bold intros soon descend. In some of the more forgettable tracks, ‘Blindfolded’ and ‘Broken Glass Park’ in particular, the steady descent into banality as the songs progress means I can’t help wishing that Kerr would keep quiet and allow the promise of the opening musical atmosphere to be followed through without him.

A lack of any exciting or frankly noticeable change from verse to chorus permeates the album. This bestows a jaded air upon the album, reinforcing the reminder of Simple Minds’ fading fame, ironically much like an old pair of ‘80s jeans. Big Music is imbued with distinctly ‘80s sounding vibes, but the attempts by Simple Minds to half-modernise their sound leaves it feeling awkwardly flat. Indeed, it is when the pretentious electronics are abandoned in favour of more punchy synths and prominent guitar that the album takes an exciting turn.

This is evident in ‘Imagination’, a song whose layers add the extra complexity which bestows more personality to the record than the earlier attempts which are much more reliant upon stripped back electronica and husky vocals. Similarly, ‘Concrete and Cherry Blossom’ works due to its more rock-oriented sound. It is almost as if Simple Minds have some good ideas, but lack the tools necessary to bring them to life, suffocating them early on with characterless and unoriginal musical tropes.

Big Music isn’t big, but then again, it isn’t bad either. It feels trapped between the unadulterated ‘80s character of their biggest hit ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ and the modern sound that the band are striving towards. A contribution recommended to anyone with indiscriminate taste and a passion for ‘80s revival.

If you go into an high street bookshop you’re likely to discover, nestled in between sections like ‘Tragic Real Lives,’ and ‘Cosy Crime,’ the ‘Erotic Fiction’ section. It will largely consist of implausibly bad prose and dubiously accurate depictions of kinky (but not too kinky) sexual practices. Basically every edition will be a blatant attempt to repackage 50 Shades of Grey whilst changing just enough plot points and names that the audience hopefully won’t notice. What might not cross your mind is how the availability of all literary depictions of explicit sexual activity, from high to low culture is a relatively recent development, and we largely owe it to the outcome of a 1960 legal case concerning the obscenity or otherwise of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence.

In the early Twentieth Century, if you wanted to publish something with swearing, sex, or some doubly scandalous combination of the two, you would have to print it abroad. This was the case with James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in France in 1922, and not infrequently seized by Customs when people tried to bring it back to the UK. All this in spite of the fact that if whilst ploughing through seven hundred pages of formal experimentation and obscure allusions you’re still somehow able to get off to it then frankly, you’ve earned that perverse sexual gratification.

Following a change in the law, Penguin Books decided to go ahead with the publication of their unexpurgated edition of Lawrence’s novel, but nonetheless found themselves having to defend their decision in front of judge and jury. The book was only the second to be tried under the new law, the first being a directory of prostitutes, with services they’d provide and how to contact them sold by a bookseller in (unsurprisingly) Soho.

Lady Chatterley was clearly a different beast. For a start, though you know what a certain gamekeeper does to Connie, you aren’t told how to find one for yourself. Furthermore, apart from, or even including, all the al fresco fornication, it was clearly a work with literary intent. Did its literary nature excuse the sexual content? Of particular concern was the use of a “four letter Anglo-Saxon word”, the apparently unmentionable ‘cunt’. The witnesses called to defend the novel included the Bishop of Woolwich and a professor of English Literature, who argued that the sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover was in fact deeply moralising.

The prosecution’s opening address asked if Lady Chatterley was “a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Although, at least according to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse wasn’t to be invented for three or so more years, even in 1960 this sounded hopelessly out of touch — the times were changing. Though Lady Chatterley was the book that first triumphed in the face of censorship, it’s safe to say if Lawrence’s novel hadn’t ushered in the sea-change, something else would have done.

So, what is the Chatterley trial’s legacy? Well, apart from some excellent news reel footage in which the British public mumble that they are buying the book “for a friend” (maybe clichés weren’t invented until 1963 either) it’s been traditionally thought that the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover ushered in a new wave of societal permissiveness and sexual liberation.

Whilst that might be a romanticised or exaggerated view of events, this triumph of art over censorship was a landmark event in literary history, and shaped what we can buy and read in bookshops today.

With Akon and Snoop Dogg rapping about their randy desires in ‘I Wanna Fuck You’, E.L. James bringing sadomasochism to the mainstream with her Fifty Shades of Grey and Jeff Koons exhibiting his pornographic series of photographs, Made in Heaven, at New York’s Witney Museum, it is clear that we have a cultural obsession with the portrayal of sex. The coital act penetrates art from its lowest to its very highest forms; not a single medium is exempt from our collective prurience.

So what precedents does this sexual saturation have in the cultural history of the Western world? In Ancient Greece, the myths of Plutarch and Homer told salacious tales such as that of Aphrodite, goddess of sex, who grew out of the foaming semen of her father’s castrated testicles, and Hercules, a mortal hero, who ravished fifty virgins in one night and had an affair with his nephew, Iolaus. The female poet, Sappho, from the island of Lesbos — hence the word lesbian — composed a Hymn to Aphrodite that featured plenty of female homoeroticism. Ceramics were often painted with sexual scenes, some of them featuring homosexual or pederastic (the sexual relationship between a man and a boy) practices. The Greeks had no concept of pornography, as sex was not associated with immorality or illegality, so these depictions were simply reflections of every day life.

The Romans were just as open in their attitude toward sex, considering depictions of sexual acts to be in good taste. One of the first objects that was excavated from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum was a marble statue showing the god Pan having sex with a goat. These towns were also littered with engravings of phalluses and testicles, the purpose of which was to advertise brothels and merely serve as decoration. Sex appears extensively in literature of the time, too: Cicero delivered speeches attacking his opponents’ sexual conduct, Ovid composed humorous erotic elegies and Juvenal railed against the sexual mores of his society. Pliny even gave practical advice for contraceptives, recommending the unappealing combination of pigeon droppings mixed with oil and wine.

So why did this all change? The answer is simple: the Bible. The canonical text of the Judaeo-Christian tradition introduced teachings on sexual morality for the first time. It taught that sex has its proper place in marriage with the dual purpose of pleasure and procreation. As such, many of the sexual acts that the ancients practised came to be seen as sinful, and their depiction immoral. Christian ethics meant that frank descriptions of sexuality almost disappeared from literature. Art became dominated by iconography and music by sacred chants, which unsurprisingly featured rather little rumpy-pumpy. Christian teachings certainly diminished references to sex in art, but did not eradicate them completely. Many of the stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales contain saucy sexual adventures, most notably those of the prolific Wife of Bath.

The Renaissance, which started around the Fourteenth Century, was a sexual revolution of sorts. Michelangelo created beautiful drawings of naked male bodies to present to his young lover and Leonardo boasted that his painting of the Madonna was so beautiful that the man who purchased it was plagued by indecent thoughts. Artists legitimised their depictions of erotic scenes by the fact that the themes were borrowed from antiquity. Countless paintings by Renaissance artists such as Titian, Bronzino and Correggio had Venus (the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite) as their subject. Most famous of these is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, in which the nude goddess emerges from the sea on a seashell, which has been seen as a metaphor for a woman’s vulva. Ironically, some paintings, such as Titian’s Mary Magdalen Repentant and Rembrandt’s Bathsheba with King David’s Letter drew their subjects from the Bible, the very text which had discouraged these sorts of works. Almost all of these works depicted single nudes, which were certainly suggestive but also coy: implicitly, rather than explicitly sexual.

It was not until the Enlightenment that explicit sexual content re-emerged in the arts. Novels such as Richardson’s Clarissa explored the excitement and dangers of sexual perversion while Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons was founded upon a web of sexual dalliances and discussed virginity, lesbianism, rape and abortion in no unclear terms. While Bouguereau and Courbet painted female nudes with porcelain flesh and couples with limbs intertwined, Bornet illustrated the Marquis de Sade’s erotic novels with engravings, which featured oral, orgies and orgasms. However, more often than not these works were banned and, if they did make it past the censors, were available only to the very highest echelons of society.

In the aftermath of the 1960s sexual revolution, no portrayal of sex is too shocking. We have come full circle to the times when depictions of sex held no kind of taboo. However, sex, whether overt or covert, has always existed in our artistic imagination. We may complain that our society is overly sex-orientated, but we cannot deny that it has historic precedent. Ultimately, culture breeds sex as much as sex breeds culture.