Conflict breeds creativity. Some of the most famous cultural achievements throughout history have been borne out of life-long rivalries. Although undoubtedly geniuses in their own right, James Hunt may never have won Formula 1 were it not for Niki Lauda; Mozart may never have composed The Magic Flute were it not for Salieri; Steve Jobs may never have come up with the iPad were it not for Bill Gates.

One such creative rivalry was that betweenthe two painters, HenriMatisse and Pablo Picasso. Both of them lived in Paris in the early 20thcentury, members of a wide network of highly creative personalities, including Surrealist figures such as the poet André Breton and the painter Salvador Dalí. Both were trying to forge the new cultural direction in the plastic arts, revolutionising artistic practices.

Matisse, eleven years Picasso’s senior, was the first painter to create ‘ugly’ art. This inspired Picasso to break completely from artistic prec- edent and paint works that were disjointed, challenging, and far from aesthetically pleas- ing. The same year that Matisse painted hisBlue Nude, Picasso produced one of his most famous paintings, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,both of which were radical departures from traditional European painting in their portrayal of women as grotesque, confrontational and menacing. Matisse in turn borrowed from Picasso, incor- porating African artefacts in his paintings, for example in the portrait of his wife, Madame Amélie Matisse, in which she wears a tribal African mask.

That is not to say that Matisse and Picasso were similar as men. For one thing, Matisse  was a Frenchman and Picasso, a Spaniard. In addition, Matisse normally wore a simple tweed suit, whereas Picasso preferred a worker’s uni- form; Matisse had one wife for 41 years, while Picasso had scores of mistresses; Matisse liked to launch into conceptual discussions about art that would captivate the room, whereas Picasso shied away from speaking, self- conscious about his spoken French. Matisse once said of him and his rival that they were “as different as the North Pole is from the South Pole”.

“I’ve spent so much of my life being sexy that I haven’t gotten anything else done. I’ve been balling from Maine to Mexico. I haven’t a dime to show for it, but I had a swell time.”

For the hour and forty five minutes that Jason Holliday/Aaron Payne is on screen he performs an entire life to us. He becomes once more the hustler, cabaret singer, domestic worker, and sex worker of his past, and reveals himself as an astute social commentator and greatest of all, a truly captivating storyteller. We become completely immersed in the world of queer New York he inhabits in the late 1960s. Jason’s narrative is peppered with anecdotes of the shocking racism he experienced as a black, gay man and even episodes of incarceration which are all told alongside his riotous impressions of Katherine Hepburn and his star-studded anecdotes, perhaps the best loved of these the one featuring Miles Davis. 

It is the bold method of director Shirley Clarke which leads to this diverse human revelation. The feature was filmed over the course of one evening in Jason’s hotel room and gives the distinct impression of being edited live by Clarke. As Jason drinks more and is goaded by Clarke, the audience is left to question not only his stability and the veracity of what he is saying, but the ethics of what Clarke is doing here.  A chance to tell his story as he takes to the stage of his suite seems at first a portrayal on his own terms, but Jason remains the sitter in Clarke’s portrait. Her voice is certainly an intrusive one and as she coaxes more and more from him the film becomes intensely uncomfortable to watch and takes on an exploitative and far darker edge. The audience is left to question the reality of Jason’s performance, the ethics of Clarke’s, but never the power of the film.

Portrait of Jason is showing free at St Catz at 8pm on Tuesday of 4th Week. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion.

Even if you don’t remember their name, you surely remember the dance. You weren’t a noughties kid if you didn’t spend school discos trying to emulate Las Ketchup’s hand gestures in the music video for their 2002 Number 1 ‘The Ketchup Song’ .

But even such original dance moves set to nonsense Spanish couldn’t stop them from being pushed off their pedestal of fame after a week at the top.

Yet they did manage to claw their way back up.

For a few minutes in 2006, Las Ketchup played in the homes of millions across Europe as they represented Spain in Eurovision. They were playing under extremely shady circumstances (no one would ever reveal how they were picked) and even the Spanish didn’t like their song, ‘Un Blodymary’, but they did have another shot at the limelight.

Maybe if their entry had sounded better than a screeching children’s choir, or had some sassy dance moves, they could have had a shot at the top spot again. Thanks for the memories Las Ketchup, but please don’t attempt to resurrect your career a third time!

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

New Zealand duo French for Rabbits return this year with their new album Spirit. As the title might suggest, it’s a pretty ethereal affair, an album full of gently melancholic minor chords and indulgently wistful vocals. While it certainly makes for some very laid back and atmospheric listening, unfortunately it’s an album with little originality or distinction.

French For Rabbits are a very elusive group, or at least they certainly wish to appear so. Should you want to make contact with them, their website will direct you to a page entitled “commune”, or indeed should you want to find out what they’re up to, their news page is called “oracle”. This airy aloofness may however be their greatest asset as artists and performers.

What we do know about French for Rabbits is that they are comprised of vocalist Brooke Singer and instrumentalist John Fitzgerald.

Singer is very talented and thoughtful. Her expressive range is particularly interesting — her voice can vary from sensual and intimate to gently unhinged with impressive ease. Lyrically it is often hard to make out what she is singing, but the few words that I can make out speak of obligatory heartbreak, sadnessand betrayal. To her credit it is very difficult to describe her sound by comparing her to other singers, but something akin to Florence Welch’s Lungs period seems about right.

Her counterpart Fitzgerald is a highly versatile instrumentalist in the number of sounds he combines. Where he really shines is as a guitarist though. The tone of his sound is very smooth yet distinct and you can definitely seethe influence of bands like The xx in some of his arrangements, with the hypnotically looping single notes as background to the vocal spectacle. Chromatics is also a good point of reference here in the general tone and sound that comes across.

All of this sounds great on paper, The xx-cum-Florence and the Machine-cum-Chromatics with a floaty folk twist. The trouble is that the actual result is just a little underwhelming. Put it like this, it went well as an accompaniment to an essay crisis: gentle, inoffensive but ultimately not all that interesting.

Justified or not, the group do seem to take themselves quite seriously. No doubt as their range develops their image and style will amass a following who will cherish Spirits as a tragically underrated early classic. But I think for the rest of us, it just makes for a mellow autumnal afternoon listen.

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

DJ and producer Sebastien Mullaert has released Reflections of Nothingness in collaboration with Israeli electronic producer Eitan Reiter. As with every new electronic release, standing apart from the swathes of material appearing on the web every day is essential.

Reflections of Nothingness, a name that may initially sound like the title of a gap year student’s account of their year abroad in a Himalayan monastery, actually provides something profound enough to meditate upon.

‘Enter The Spiral’ opens the album in a mechanic yet uncompromising fashion, slowly progressing from distant, reverberated beats and distended soft synthesiser touches to enter a hypnotizing sonic world.

The music takes a distinctly more trance-like step with ‘Ash Layla’, consisting of a danceable beat layered with effects (one of which sounds frustratingly like a vibrating phone). The machine enters a shut down phase by the final track ‘Faith’, some faint yet haunting vocals ring out sadly, and are looped and distorted.

As with so many albums, it is easy to break Reflections of Nothingness down into two distinct sections; the first of which has a more upbeat trance vibe, and the second of which is purely focussed on experimental synthesised downbeat.

If Mullaert and Reiter have done anything expertly, it is to create a soundscape where changes in tempo and sounds from the real world bring the listener into a new dimension.

The idea behind North Atlantic Explorers’ new concept album My Father Was A Sailor is a simple and unsubtle one. Its title sums up its subject.

The album apparently charts the blossoming of a parents’ relationship, against the backdrop of the sea and long periods spent apart. A sweet idea, but not an entirely successful one.

The vocals of Stuart David (of Belle and Sebastian fame) sound more like the opening to Balamory than the intended shipping forecast. An instrumen- tal follows and I’m about to give up hope. But then enters the single ‘Don’t Want Anyone Else’.

The soothing twanging of banjos complements the choral harmony perfectly. It is a simple yet sweet song, and an early (and rare) highlight in the album.

If Neutral Milk Hotel and Slow Club had a love child, chances are, in their infancy they would sound like North Atlantic Explorers. My Father Was A Sailor uses similar orchestral arrangements, piercing trumpets and uncomplicated guitars.

You can feel emotion outpouring in ‘Spiral Into The Sea’, the simple beauty of which the sentimentalist in me cannot help but appreciate.

‘Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle’ is the album’s lowest point, yet you can’t help but smile when he utters “Goodnight gentleman, good sailing” as the album comes to a close.

★★★★★
Five Stars

Life Story opens with David Attenborough lounging around in the desert with some meerkats. Perfect, this is exactly the sort of thing you want from a BBC nature program, I think, especially one whose first episode promises to be about baby animals taking their ‘first steps’ in the world. I’m watching it while I’m doing the washing up, just about to make myself a cup of tea, not really interested in the meerkats, if I’m honest, but I’m enjoying the cosiness of the thing and the soothing tones of Attenborough’s voice, which has a similar effect on me to that of a large whiskey.

And then come the goslings. That was a one-clause sentence for dramatic effect, yes. What can be so dramatic about some goslings, you ask? If you’ve seen it, you’ll know exactly what I’m on about; if you haven’t, take a minute before you open up iPlayer to remind yourself that, of course, nature isn’t all about baby meerkats frolicking in the sand — it’s about the constant struggle for survival. 

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We’re in Greenland, in the Orsted Dal valley, where barnacle geese bring their young into the world. Due to the constant threat of predators, they are forced to nest at the top of 400 foot high, vertical cliffs, which are pretty terrifying in themselves, especially in HD. Here are the goslings, four pathetically cute fluff-balls nestled under the wing of mother goose.

The problem is that barnacle geese only eat grass. The fundamental irony of Greenland is that there isn’t actually much grass — especially not on top of huge rock pillars. So, the ‘first steps’ of these babies, whose wings we are told are too undeveloped to work yet, involves following Mum and Dad off the edge of a cliff in search of food.

And, blindly, off they go. I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen still wearing my rubber gloves, staring at my laptop in abject horror as five helpless baby birds base-jump off a cliff. This just isn’t practical, nature, I think, as the chicks rocket towards the ground, wings desperately outstretched, slamming again and again against the edge of the jagged rock face to dramatic music (thanks, BBC). It’s so distressing to watch that I’m actually whimpering by this point. My housemate (who is watching American Horror Story in the next room) has to come in and ask if I’m okay.

Two out of five of the chicks die in the fall (we see it happen!); the two chicks on the ground are visibly shaking, and there is a heart wrenching searching-for-baby-goose scene before third chick emerges from behind a pile of rubble. The little family then hobble off to safety, thank bloody god. 

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The hits keep on coming. The next ‘life story’, for example, features the birth of some baby praying mantises. They aren’t cute, but they’re sort of beautiful in an alien way, and the camerawork is spectacular. I’m just warming to them when they start eating each other. One of them (the protagonist?) then wins a fight with a massive spider before being eaten by another bigger mantis, possibly its mother. “Praying mantis, after all, are cannibals” says Attenborough, happily.

By mid-way through the program, even the baby meerkat is savagely devouring a huge scorpion. So, Life Story is brutal, it’s honest. But it’s also ridiculously, breathtakingly beautiful, a great deal of which has to do with the quality of the photography; I spend a great deal of it wondering if it isn’t actually just really, really good CGI. Of course it’s not; according to the ‘making of’ it’s just some very big lenses and a lot of waiting around. This, I think, is the magic of Life Story. It’s the sort of camerawork we have come to expect from big-budget blockbusters. The editors work wonders in creating parts of the animal world, seen in more detail than anyone would actual plot lines, narratives, almost characters.

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This isn’t just nature watching: it’s a thrilling insight into some of the most dangerous, cut-throat parts of the animal world, seen in more detail than anyone would ever manage to achieve with their own eyes.  

The word ‘Netsky’ to a computer scientist would mean a computer worm, an unwelcome virus that spreads and infects via email. But the Netsky I was to interview raids our computers in a very different way — via iTunes.

Netsky (a.k.a. Boris Daenen) is one of today’s biggest names in drum and bass and liquid funk. He started teaching himself to produce around the age of 15. “I don’t have the patience for manuals or tutorials,” he told me. “I always loved finding out what different knobs and filters would do.” Boris dropped out of university in Belgium to pursue music, but part of his first album was made while he was still studying. “For some reason you could wearyour headphones in class, so that’s what I did… I feel if you want to follow your dream you should take a year to give yourself a chance to see what you want to do, but it’s important to set a deadline on that.”

I asked Boris if he felt he had reduced his room for improvement by becoming one of the best in the world at what he does (despite being only 25!). He claims the opposite, that each time he improves as an artist there is even more to discover. “There’s so much to learn and so many people I look up to and I think it’ll always be that way… It’s just impossible to be the best in music, there’s so many other producers and cool genres that you could never do. Which is cool, it keeps you focused.”

I ask if his live sets ever begin to feel routine? “I’ve always felt nervous before any kind of appearance,” says Daenen. “I always want to do really well, it’s important to have that feeling and I think the day that will go away is when it becomes a 9-5 job. That’s really not what I’m trying to do with music.”

Classical music, soul and Motown are all genres Boris enjoys listening to, all of which seem to be as different as it gets from drum and bass, “Then again it’s very close to drum and bass as well, it’s not impossible to combine drum and bass with classical music for example. The only thing I can’t listen to is really hard rock, or funk rock. That’s not really my thing.”

He claims it’s “a real disease” to be a producer; it’s difficult to listen to music in a relaxed way. That’s why he enjoys classical. He tells me, “It’s the most honest music, it just shows a melody, and there’s no production to it.”

Some of Netsky’s favourite places to play include Coachella, New Zealand and his hometown of Antwerp, but he is eager to perform for the first time at Red Rocks in Denver. He also sounds excited to return to Oxford in a few weeks with ‘Netsky LIVE!’. “We’ll be bringing some special guests. I’ve got a drummer, a keyboard player, an MC, some guest vocalists, and a whole production show… The drummer plays all the drums live, he’s a machine. He really kills it.”

I was eager to talk about Daenen’s third studio album, of which there are hints of a release early next year. “I really enjoy working on different styles of music now as well. I think it’s really important for producers to step out of their comfort zones, to try and break out of the projection of what people think you are. I think it’s important to surprise people.”

Any hints about the title? “I haven’t really made up my mind yet… People have been telling me I should call it 3 after 2 and Netsky, but I’m not sure — It’s gonna include some really weird collaborations and I’m excited about that!” Netsky and 2 both send shivers down my spine. Boris’ creativity is mind-blowing and his skills in a production studio are to match. His third album is going to have thousands of eyes and ears locked on to it. If you’re a fan, keep your eyes and ears on his autumn tour when it reaches town.

Netsky plays the O2 Academy on November 5th.

I cannot but vividly recall my excitement when I discovered that David Tennant, a sometime idol of mine, was to take the titular role in Gregory Doran’s RSC production of Richard II. It had taken on an almost mythical status in my imagination; I couldn’t miss it.

I was, alas, to be callously tortured, as the tickets evaporated from the RSC website in a matter of seconds. I clicked and typed my way to the re-sale pages with feverish desperation, but the price was already three figures long and climbing before my very eyes and I was doomed to look wistfully on as five-star reviews gush from the pages of the Saturday papers — curse the social elites and journalists with their privileged access! “Go thou and fill another room in hell!”

But lo! What is this Internet advertisement hovering out of the mist of page 33 of your Google search? “RSC live, showing Doran’s Richard II in a cinema near you…” I could hardly believe my hope-starved eyes! I was going to see the production after all, and for the inconceivably reasonable price of £12, with popcorn! 

I did go to see Richard II in my local Cineworld and I enjoyed it immensely, but it left me wondering whether there are some fundamental differences between the mediums of film and theatre that could never allow the stage to transfer to the screen with any real impact. The   opportunities for greater accessibility not only for theatre, but opera, ballet, concerts et al are impossible to ignore.

For performances and concerts often made exclusive and unreachable by a finite number of seats or an astronomic price tag, the cinema is ideally positioned to allow prospective audiences the chance to experience what they would have missed. NT Live has broadcast to 550 cinemas in the UK and more than 1,100 venues worldwide, meaning that 3.5 million more people were able, to all intents and purposes, to go to the theatre. Could cinema be the cheap alternative to the perennial problem of expensive (and therefore exclusionary) performances?  But what exactly are we getting access to?

The camera, while undoubtedly an artistic tool in itself, imposes a distance between the audience and the stage, which simply cannot allow for the total sensory experience that productions at the Globe or the National Theatre often are. 

The proximity of your body to the actors’ and to the stage is fundamental in the creation of something real and visceral, something that follows you from your seat as you leave the auditorium. What’s more, a camera’s eye is inevitably selective, whereas yours may roam about the stage and set with abandon. When filmed, little, but delightful details that for part of the stage-play’s charm are missed as the camera swings and switches between the leads. The film cannot but select and deselect on the audience’s behalf: an inevitability that enriches film, but diminishes the theatrical production.

That said, the immediacy is not dissipated between the screen and the eye; it changes. Cameras can zoom in and catch fragments, twitches and beads of sweat that our eyes would miss. We are now, in a perverse way, closer to the actor and yet further from the production, which is no longer delivered as a total and ever-present picture, but as a series of close and intense visions, interspersed with wider glimpses of the stage.

For a particularly choice example of this technique, go to Elliot Levey’s tight-lipped and drawn Don Jon in Digital Theatre’s broadcast of Josie Rourke’s Much Ado About Nothing. I would, therefore, go so far as to say that, while it will never be the same, theatre in the cinema is something else altogether. Cine-theatre, when done well, combines the intensity of a well-held camera angle, with the raw power of a live theatre performance.  

And if cinemas get the chance to broadcast some ‘alternative content’ and more people than ever are able to witness the ineffable greatness of David Tennant, then long may it continue.