In his latest film, We Have a Pope (originally called Habemus Papam), Moretti, who has won a Palme d’Or at Cannes for previous work, tells the story of a cardinal who is elected to the papacy and, in the course of the summons to the Vatican balcony to greet the crowd, has a nervous attack and is unable to fulfill his duty to God or his people. Moretti conceived the film with this image in mind: the Pope-elect sandwiched between the earthly weight of the global faithful and their expectations and the spiritual weight of God’s message.  
      
Speaking to me through an interpreter, Moretti explains: “The whole film was born of that idea, of a pope who is a few metres from the balcony, which faces on to the world… and he just cannot go on. I wanted to convey that sense of being inadequate, in private and in public, of not being at the height of expectations – not all the time, but some of the time.” During filming Moretti showed the script to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, who spoke approvingly of it. Moretti, an atheist, is keen to stress that he did so not in order to seek the cardinal’s blessing, but out of curiosity as to how he would judge it.

The film certainly pokes fun, but a gentle ribbing is all it amounts to. We witness Australian cardinals, new in town and keen to escape the papal conclave (which is maintained throughout the Pope’s period of soul-searching), to view the latest Caravaggio exhibition and drink low-froth cappuccinos. A Swiss Guard with a liking for Mercedes Sosa bolero is enlisted to stand in for the Pontiff.  

In a cultural milieu that seems to promote bunga bunga-type television presenters and buffone popular comedy, Moretti is perhaps conditioned into parsimony with his choice of humour. One interviewer quotes him as saying: ”I like a type of comedy that subtracts. My type of comedy does not overdo things.” Moretti illustrated for the interviewer by placing crockery, glasses and ashtrays in a pile. “This is traditional Italian comedy,” he said, “putting everything in and overdoing things.” After dispersing the objects he proclaimed: “This is my comedy.”

Moretti does lapse into obdurate, bunch-shouldered silence when I push him for themes in his comedic set pieces, although his severity itself has something slightly hammy about it. One senses that this would be the worst thing you could say to him; his cinema has always been obsessed with the flaws of all things Italian, from his Caiman film, which simultaneously attacks the Italian film industry (a frequent target) and the original caimano, Berlusconi. The director released the film weeks before the parliamentary elections in 2006 and it reportedly swayed the vote, with Berlusconi losing by a narrow margin.

Moretti’s films have been described as extensions of commedia all’italiana (more or less Italian film comedy in the style you would expect it) and, as Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli point out in The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: “The most distinctive component of Moretti’s humour is its ‘disenchanted, reflexive and sad’ irony, which contrasts with … commedia all’italiana, and can more appropriately be described as derisive, as seeking the complicity of the audience and at times even as coarse.”

Moretti’s exposure to the coarseness of this Italian genre has clearly informed his irony and taught him personal restraint. But when we meet his Italian-ness it is as apparent as his departed prime minister’s: flamboyance in relief.  

Concrete themes are thin on the ground for a director who specialises in postmodernism. Discussing the scenes where the Pope wanders around Rome like a lost soul searching for redemption, Moretti says: “There are parts of the movie that we wanted to show without being too literal about it. They were showing but were left for people to see. When I show the Pope roaming the city among ordinary people, I don’t want to explain. It could be a hint to the Catholic Church about something – to open itself to worlds which are different from its own.

“Likewise, without wanting to be too heavy-handed about it, I wanted to show a psychoanalyst, who is atheist and slightly deranged, who all of a sudden finds himself interacting with these 80-year-old cardinals.”

The film’s climactic scene has the cardinals (imprisoned within the Vatican for their interminable conclave, while the errant Pope wanders the streets) taking part in a volleyball tournament orchestrated by the psychoanalyst. The teams are divided by continents, and at one stage the analyst tries to elect captains based on the cardinals who received best odds for election in the Italian newspapers. Of course, the scene has an irreverent aspect which might cloy with some Catholics, but it also is one of crowning, music-led choreography, mirroring the “musical” scenes in previous Moretti pictures Aprile and Sweet Dreams. The scene was filmed in a cortile interno, or inner courtyard, of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Moretti says: “There is a weight to the scenes that I can express with the use of the ‘musical’ device, as well as elsewhere in the film when we listen to the music of Mercedes Sosa when the radio plays in the Pope’s quarters. I felt here the cardinals were in a sense liberated. I liked the clash between this deranged psychoanalyst and these 80-year-old cardinals who are like children. The cardinals find themselves without a guide because they witness the breakdown of the Pope, and through the actions of this silly psychoanalyst they managed to forget for an instance the crisis they are living through.”   
    
The film also shows the Pope experimenting with psychoanalysis to cope with his crisis. Moretti, who often appears in his own films, plays the analyst, a role which contains autobiographical aspects. Moretti often includes such self-referential roles for himself, sometimes appearing as a director, a tactic which has been compared to Federico Fellini’s 8½ or Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. Coincidentally Michel Piccoli, the star alongside Brigitte Bardot in Contempt 48 years ago, plays the Pope in this film, in a role he has been acclaimed for.

In We Have a Pope, Moretti the analyst feels compassion for the Pope’s plight. “Everyone always tells me: ‘As an analyst, you are the best.’ My wife is also an analyst, and she can’t deal with it.” The Pope and the analyst sit down for a session surrounded by all the cardinals, rather like a scene in his compatriot Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, before a put-upon assistant tells Moretti: “The idea of the subconscious is absolutely contrary to the teachings of the Church.” I ask Moretti if he believes that psychoanalysis and Catholicism are compatible. “Let’s be clear: this is first and foremost a funny scene,” he says. “We are trying to make the audience understand that the Pope is clashing with a representative of a world that was alien to the Catholic faith. I just wanted to show that the Catholic Church traditionally is closed to new things and would have to make an enormous effort in order to meet somewhere in the middle with the world of psychoanalysis.”

Moretti took care with his portrayal of the Vatican’s interior. “In juxtaposition with the previous American representations of the Vatican, I wanted to represent it as less baroque and more austere,” he says, “because in a way it was fairer, more true to life. Often films that feature the Vatican use palazzos that are of successive periods and tend to be more over the top. We also made a façade of the front of St Peter’s, which was constructed in Cinecittà [Rome’s famous film studios].”

I ask with trepidation if I can see a photograph of the façade. Moretti considers my request, looks crossly into the corner of the room and produces a card for his personal film company with a flourish. The motherly translator smiles at me encouragingly. Perhaps not all journalists get this card. Mr Awkward is lowering his hackles.

I’m let into a council flat on the first floor of a red brick tenement on Battersea Bridge Road, one mile from the richest area in town. Inside is a dilapidated series of rooms, the main one adapted from a 4 x 4 living room into a bedroom, the bed unmade, and the walls covered in photos of grinning black school kids and a dazed-looking man stood in front of a pile of speakers. On the bed, looking disheveled and distinctly un-star-like sits Bunny Lee. He is in London on a flying visit, dressed in an oversized American football top and shorts, his ash grey hair kept in place by a sea captain’s hat which he puts on for photographs. He is unwilling to answer any questions; it takes him 40 minutes and a phone call to his biographer to convince him.

Tappa Zukie walks in and explains: “The Englishman want everything for themself. What we need to talk about is how everyone is trying to take away the reggae from us. The Englishman dem try and take it away from us, and they treat it better so we try and hand it over without them even trying to steal it.” 

The poverty of Bunny, one of the handful of men who invented dub, is living proof of Tappa Zukie’s statement. I tell them that they would help introduce dub music to a wider audience, Clash’s audience. “We’ve been introducing the music to you for forty years” says Lee tiredly, his grey football top riding up above his huge, stretch-marked belly as he leans back and makes another call.

Dub music began in 1968 when, during a recording session at Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle Studio in Kingston, the engineer forgot to put the vocal on a track. This instrumental version was very soon after played at another sound system operator’s dance, teasing a new excitement out of the crowd that spurred Bunny Lee, who was present for that fateful mistake, to coin the concept of the instrumental ‘B-Side’.

Lee goes on to explain how King Tubby developed on the mistake: “Now Tubbs take it a step further. Soon after he play at a big party [with his sound system Hometown HiFi]. Tubbs start off with a Slim Smith tune, ‘Me Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’ and he start with the vocal part, and then him drop it out and lick in the pure riddim. Then him drop in part of de voice once more.”

So much has been written about dub music, about the deep effects it creates, that it is better to leave descriptions to another man. As critic Mark Fisher had it: “Dub works through hints, suggestions and feints: [which] function not as teases but as positive deviations from both climax and idling on the spot…Desire is neither engorgement nor emaciation, but…how to get the right amount you need to keep moving.”

Every producer of the golden era of dub had his trademark: Joe Gibbs and his studio partner Errol Thompson pioneered the delay echo, Lee Perry was the king of the fazer, that rustling, ‘wet’ sound you can hear in his roughshod dub, Bunny Lee was the creator of the jarring cymbal, like sheet metal being struck, and King Tubby was the master of the ‘double exposure’, a fixing of bass and treble frequencies that allowed them to both play in clean equilibrium.   

This was the sound of Jamaica, a Jamaica that, if it wasn’t for UK demand, would never have had its dub exported further, whatever Tappa Zukie says. It was label men like Chips Richards and Lee Gopthal that in the early 1970s would encourage Jamaican artists to tack together collections of instrumental ‘B-Sides’ and dubbed ‘versions’ to fuel the hunger for the UK market of [as a contemporary Adrian Sherwood describes to me] “people sitting at home, listening to wacked-out dub stuff smoking weed.”    

Dennis Bovell had created possibly the first UK dub ‘tune’ in aged 16 in 1969, in a bell tower opposite Wandsworth Prison. He used a quarter-inch tape loop and a recording of his teacher playing ‘Guantanamera’ on flute. Bovell’s troubled history with racism in the UK [he was targeted and wrongfully convicted for inciting an affray in 1974] didn’t stop him from forming fruitful cross-alliances between punk and post-punk and dub music from Jamaica. He was an avid fan of King Tubby – creating pure dub LPs as Blackbeard that aped his mentioned ‘double-exposure’ technique – whilst simultaneously using dub as a foil to one of the most unique voices in UK punk – Ari Up’s.

Up’s love of reggae music has been well documented, and Bovell tells me how on tracks like ‘New Town’ he would balance Ari’s quaver with deep bass. At the same time he would implement styles of musique concrète into his dub production – ‘New Town’ was partly about heroin, so he would – in order – tap an ashtray with a spoon, shuffle a box of matches, then strike a match. Bovell also created dub music for Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry, and would explain to me how Johnson’s poetry books would be the first written dub: “In one of his books the first three pages would read ‘blood, blood, blood’, just written again and again. The next three pages would be just ‘fire, fire, fire’. Then it occurred to me that he was actually writing in dub, using the same echoes as in the music.”

While Bovell was adapting punk into dub, elsewhere in the UK Adrian Sherwood and his On-U sound brought Jamaica smashing into the face of British punk. Sherwood harnessed the power of artists like Prince Far-I, ‘the daddy of rough voice’ [also nicknamed ‘Prince Cry Cry’ for his habit of breaking into tears when extremely angry]. Far-I was a bulky, trouble-prone Jamaican dub chanter who with gigs at venues like the 100 Club in London would attract artists like Billy Idol, The Slits and the well-known dub heads John Lydon and Paul Simonon. Far-I would form part of Sherwood’s pivotal ‘Singers and Players’ collective, the first and only dub supergroup comprising of singers Bim Sherman, Prince Hammer, Far-I and Mikey Dread

Far-I, a former bouncer, was close friends with Claudie Massop, the infamous JLP strong man of 1970s Jamaica and leader of the Shower Posse of Tivoli Gardens, and when Massop was assassinated in 1979 it has been suggested that Far-I’s protection in the Kingston ghettos was gone. In 1983 he was shot dead alongside his wife at his home in Kingston. His cousin recalled the scene: “In the living room you see the blood with his fingermarks all over the wall, [like] when person [is] in agony.”

Sherwood’s interest in dub led to a resuscitation of Lee Perry’s career in 1986, with some bumps along the way: one story recalls an On-U Sound boat cruise of the same year featuring Mark Stewart and Bim Sherman when Perry, hanging out in Sherwood’s East Ham home before the cruise, drank a bottle of Polish vodka before boarding the ship and doing karaoke lying on his back as the boat sailed past the Houses of Parliament. Due to suspected drugs on board, the boat began being tailed by the police, for Perry to get on the megaphone and scream back at them across the dark river: “Back off Babylon! Fire on your head on the river Thames!”

 With 1973’s ‘Blackboard Jungle Dub’ album, Lee Perry is the author of one of the five dub albums that vie for a place as the first ever recorded. Bunny Lee remembers Perry’s famed tendency for improvisation and off-the-cuff conducting: “We used to experiment a lot. You would be playing and Scratch would come up to you and go [makes tearing sound and gesture] and it sound good inna de control room. Scratch even get man to play domino inna de studio, slamming dem down for people to record.”

Speaking to me about his use of technology, or lack thereof, Perry says: “The four-track that I work on was just four, but they could not find the other twenty. The other twenty was the spirit…” he ends, laughing softly. In an unexpected stream of invective he adds: “King Tubby didn’t have any spirit to teach him, Tubby didn’t have any righteousness in him, any godliness in him, didn’t have any rastafari in him. Tubby is the meanest man that ever live on the planet earth. Totally mean. So mean that they did come and shoot him.”   

He signals the difference between Tubby [acknowledged globally as the originator of the remix] and himself: “King Tubby never make live recordings with musician – King Tubby only use his mixing board and go over riddim they a making in the studio. The difference between me and King Tubby is that me [conduct] the [live] riddims on my side, and he did not make the riddims on his side him only mix them. Him not my competition. They working like scavenger, they just mixing, not creating.”

Back in Battersea, Bunny Lee is also cursing the scavengers. The name of one prominent European dub producer, comes up, and he starts shouting: “What him know about dub? Him nuh come from Jamaica – him make more money out of the business than we. Him a tour and play dub live around the world!” An executive from Jamaican record label Black Solidarity, also perched in the cramped room with Bunny Lee, expands: “[The unnamed producer] is a carbon copy of dub. I’m a explain: if you go to Steve Jobs, and you say to him, we have a copy of an iPhone  – him gonna laugh at you, It’s the same with Bunny Lee and dub.”

Speaking to Pupajim, the French dub collective, one could not see a more different picture of the positive adoptions of the Jamaican blueprint. Jim, the singer in the group, gives me a rundown of the sound systems in France, which include Pupajim’s Stand High Patrol in their native Brest, and others like Zion Gate from Nantes, OBF from Geneva, Blackboard Jungle from Rouen and Chalice Sound from Lille. As well as clear Jamaican and UK influences, he cites an early contact with “French new wave artists like Indochine, Gainsbourg and Christophe. I didn’t like their lyrics but their production was an influence – we particularly liked 80s digital reggae like Wayne Smith’s ‘Under Me Sleng Teng’ – and they used similar drum machine patterns.”

The progression from dub to cyberdub is vast –  in terms of vocals, Sherwood had singers like Prince Far-I, Basic Channel had Tikiman, while more liberal definitions of dub like hip hop and jungle had  crossover artists from reggae in Super Cat and Top Cat respectively. Technologically, we arrive at the amplifiers built by Autechre and Basic Channel’s large lathe cutting facility in Berlin as a logical progression of King Tubby’s homespun rig and small dubplate production unit in Kingston.

Musicality, Mad Professor points out, is perhaps second in importance to a knowledge of electronics and rhythm in dub: “Dennis [Bovell] for example, is  a bit too musical for dub. Dub, when you get to know it, you don’t have to be too musical to make it. More than musicality, there’s something more spiritual in dub: a direct African connection – like in Joe Gibbs’ early work – where the drums became more prominent. When dub is the bridge to what was lost through slavery, and what Africa retained.”

The last word inevitably falls to Perry: “God is the son of the Spirit. Dub is the baby. Baby have no natty dread, no bal’ head. Dub is the electronic baby. He’ll go back to Nigeria, his name is Baby Tafari. Repeat after me! Baby Tafari, off on a jungle safari”.

200 miles northward and three years after the god of punk boofed the five large in the rubbish bag, Andrew Weatherall met Bobby Gillespie at an acid house rave in Manchester. Gillespie handed Weatherall a copy of “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have”, and Weatherall remixed it into a disco’d, slowed down version of acid house as it existed, a glorious, empowering journey of a track: Loaded by Primal Scream.

The Fridge is now the Electric, and Primal Scream are now celebrities from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, but listening to them rock this venue, both having histories that encompass punk, rare groove and hard dance, you felt part of what it is to come from Britain, the source for all these twisting songlines.

Let’s Buy Happiness opened the night, with a great set that vindicated their selection by fans of their set at the Levi’s in store show recently. The group from Newcastle have a great lead in the beautiful Sarah Hall, and promise great things in veins all-Icelandic with their killer track Six Wolves dominating proceedings.

Worship followed, the tipped Reading contingent beautifully amplified by the excellent Electric sound system – the muffled bass of their early hit Collateral an example. In Your Blood was lighter, and perhaps more successful – the pinks and purples of the stage lights evoking a welcome tenderness.

Primal Scream entered the stage to frenzied, pit-coagulating acclaim. Bobby Gillespie, envelope thin in a lamé gold shirt and Mani with snowy white mane and an easy grin. Three tracks in Mary Pearce, the imperious black singer appeared on stage, and with a “Come on Brixton, let’s have it” opened up the night. Was followed was a carnival. The red, vortexing slinkies of the visuals harked back to a baggy, piano chorded time that I was not old enough to rave to but listened to in my bedroom, extended plays of Higher Than The Sun brought gilt waves of warm, shambling nostalgia coming through in funk waves.

The tracks didn’t come in segments, but in a wave of ten minute long journeys, after long periods of immersion, you snapped back and realized nothing had finished. The golds and blues of the newly painted theatre shone, and I prayed I could have been in the centre, not negotiating the beery side wall between a pile of clothes and a mouthy bloke with a face off the terraces at Ibrox.

The guitar riffs of Loaded saw Mani shine, showing his best during a show dominated by Gillespie. For Rocks Bobby camp-clapped, looped the mic cord around his throat and let it hang, then stopped, walking out with no flourish.

With the jolt of one drop
Absorbing another
My heart spasms
Like it was receiving to much blood

Gobbet of deep, pure acid
Fiddle your way down
My chest, bore a hole
To fit a cedar bole in
And shift it around

My teeth hurt
From grinding
One cracked open
Just like an egg

Love, love, love glide me away with your gondolier
Sing it Neapolitan farces and Andaluz dances
And what heiresses say when they pray

There is a scene in Hype Williams’ film Belly that illustrates his style. Nas, DMX and another friend arrive at DMX’s house after robbing a nightclub. DMX retires to his beige pool table while Nas and his accomplice sit back in the vaulted, white New York loft, in their patent black low-slung pants and scalpeled fades. “I loved this nigga’s crib man. It always reminded me of what I wanted to have, eventually. A phat new crib like his shit? One day…” narrates Nas in his husky teen-octave as they squeak into their cream armchairs. And then they slap on Gummo. You know, Gummo, that fucking weird Harmony Korine film that you always vowed to watch after he did Kids but looked a bit too oddball in the posters to actually invest in. “Your rabbit smells like pussy” screams an eleven-year-old onscreen to at a boy in pink cardboard bunny ears.  The scene jarrs in the sleek white crib, the crew edge uncomfortably on their nice leather seats, and Hype Williams’ double-edged sword cuts sharp into the room.
 
Hype Williams was the richest 29-year old in rap at the turn of the millennium. He might have invented – had Third Eye not got there before in 1993 - the term bling, but basically coloured it in, inventing the Maybach/Cristal/Cessna concept, with stubbornly maverick twist; energising the image that hip hop had, putting it on a global platform and spawning the bugbear of every conscious rapper since – the MTV rap video.

Born in 1970 in Hollis in Queens, New York, the son of a Honduran and an African-American, he went to school with Run-DMC and LL Cool J, and began shooting minor promotional videos for Russell Simmons’ label Def Jam after graduating from tea boy. As a 14-year-old he would watch The Godfather once a week, alongside Scarface, Once Upon a Time in America and 2001: Space Odyssey. He drew his inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jules Verne, J.R. Tolkien and The Chronicles of Narnia.

His pictorial style is focused on colour. His emphasis on light is key – his depictions of olives, lip-gloss primaries like poppy red and indigo were key in giving hip hop a new-found MTV-era profile. His video for Missy Elliot’s ‘The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]‘ is perhaps his most seminal, and illustrated his double-edge angle. He dressed an already overweight and seemingly-unmarketable Elliot in an inflatable bin bag: Elliot remembers meeting with Hype to discuss the outfit: “He told me he wanted to make me look like the Michelin Man. I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ And he was like, ‘Trust me. It’s going to be hot.’” The results were historic. Elliot’s unforgettable teak-purple lips tease you through the fish-eye as she manoeuvres the bubbling air pockets in her trash bag outfit like she was negotiating a rogue body inside the plastic. The trick was to turn Elliot’s weakness into her strength – the hardbody aesthetics of MTV rap chicks turned on its head.

Another important video in Hype William’s catalogue was his ‘Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check’ clip for Busta Rhymes. Here Busta looks like his baseball coat is a strait-jacket he’s trying to escape from, as he chest-beats and hyperacts in a low-rider on a neon avenue, the manic energy infecting across the screen. Williams used wide-screen and fish-eye, as he explains: “For Busta I used wide-angle lenses because he is very animated, a very extreme artist, and I was able to exaggerate his already exaggerated movements.  And Missy Elliott for her ‘The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]’ video.  I was such a fan of all these big French filmmakers and all the Grace Jones projects that redefined the black woman on film and in music that I wanted Missy to have an identity like Grace Jones’s.  Something very new and very different and very European.  When we did her wide-angle stuff, we nailed a specific look for her, and that was really her launchpad.  We made those videos look exactly how we felt about the performances in the songs.”

Hype has his role in some of the side-stories of the bling era. In 1999, he was the prophet of P Diddy’s demise in his ‘Hate Me Now’ video. Diddy and Nas both appeared crucified in the mini-epic – Diddy wanted the scene cut – it wasn’t – later that year Diddy was arrested and Nas’s manager attacked in what spelled a big downslide in Combs’s career.

Downslide was the term that could be loosely applied to the entire industry about that time. In 2000, Williams was described by The Face at The Millennium Dome, where he was coordinating a fashion shoot “While dinner is in transit, Jay-Z appears with a five-man entourage. The diamonds around Jay’s neck shimmer in rainbow shades under the show lights.  Hype rolls up his sleeves and begins thrusting his arms enthusiastically as he explains to Jay, who is due to open the show the next day, what will be expected of him.  Curiously, Hype’s regular soft, measured speech has given way to a rasping, round-the-way vernacular: ‘Niggas be like rhymin’ they rhymes,’ he growls, ‘knowhamsayin? I know you wit dat.’

“The pair retreat into a corner of the auditorium for a quiet word, though it doesn’t stay quiet for long.  ‘Yo Ab!’ Hype bellows over to his right-hand man, Abdur.  ‘Did you get that brochure for the yacht?’  He’s obviously about to acquire the ultimate Big Willie status symbol and is keen to share the news with play king Jay.”

The rainbow shaded diamonds, the yacht brochures, would in a few years all fade into post-credit crunch oblivion for an industry, which along with the rest of the music biz, saw the bottom fall out of its finances with the advent of free download. Videos no longer got million dollar budgets and online saw less people watching MTV.

“Spurred by economic woes and technological advances, younger directors are forging a new hip-hop video aesthetic, using HD cameras and impromptu settings” announced Spin magazine in 2009. “Some financially strapped artists exploit the new directors’ ingenuity to replicate the glossy look of movies or TV shows (or old Diddy clips)”. Diddy clips! Here was Williams’ work, the froth of the champagne wave, spat back out at him by the newbies who were taking his boys’ place on the rap stage. 

Aligned with this development was a remarked change in the quality of Williams’ output. A biting piece in The Village Voice called Williams “incredibly bland”; his approach to Kanye West’s ‘All Of The Lights’ video, was replete with “medium shots of Kanye, Rihanna, and Kid Cudi performing and Kanye on top of a cop car. The viewer’s left waiting for it all to come together; instead, it congeals into a mess.” Williams had varied his output to include feature films, fashion magazine cover shoots [his emphasis on colour and lighting shows how he always approached his videos as a photographer] and commercials [including ‘that’ Gap advert: ‘Gap Khaki Soul’], telling interviewers that he was sick of the restrictive medium of the music video.

As the years went on, the recurring question ‘what was the favourite cut that you did?’ always met with the response: ‘Can It Be All So Simple’ by the Wu-Tang Clan. The video is a pure Staten Island kitchen sink drama, with a sliding camera filming Raekwon detailing the tribulations of life in the New York outer boroughs, boroughs Williams knew. As he says: “I always saw superstardom in my friends. To me they had to be the same size in their music and performance ability as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Idol.” Through him, they became that. After the excess implodes, Hype remembers the good old days – like Gladys Knight in that favourite Wu-Tang track. Can it be that it was all so simple then.

The exhibition of two such wildly differing painters as Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin has incited outrage and interest on the London art scene. Poussin was the 17^th Century Classical painter, Twombly was the 20^th and 21^st century painter in the Abstract Expressionist style. Both painters took heavy inspiration from Classical themes, and produced a collection of work, which, while the titles may be similar, have dramatically and at times shockingly different outcomes.

The basis for this juxtaposition, in the eyes of curator Nicholas Cullinan, is the influence Rome had on both their careers. Both painters arrived at the city aged 30, 323 years apart. The showings of the two painters contain shared antique visions of Venus, Pan, Parnassus and Apollo, and the exhibition is divided into sections covering Arcadia, Bacchanalia and the Four Seasons, which both artists attempted aged 64.

The 323 years that separate these two painters have make for some highly unusual wall-sharing. Whilst Twombly’s works are spreads of light colour on white with scrawled logos and a spare, unfinished look, Poussin’s renditions of Classical and Biblical themes became even more formalized than those of his heroes from the early Italian Renaissance.

Nicolas Poussin was born in 1594 in Normandy. In 1624 he travelled to Rome and as a young artist worked in the studio of Domenichino, the Baroque painter from the Carracci school, who influenced him with his lucid composition and cool colouring. After an early coup with a commission for an altarpiece in St Peter’s, he succumbed to a serious illness and thenceforth adhered to his Classical rejection of the Baroque style - in favour of more measured style on a smaller scale for high-brow patrons from the bourgeoisie. In Peter and Linda Murray’s Dictionary of Art and Artists Poussin’s late style is described as: “Essays in solid geometry, with facial expressions eliminated and immobile figures…they are the logical exposition of his theories: a picture must contain the maximum of moral content expressed in a composition which shall convey its intellectual content.”

Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, a place he would proudly remember had “more columns … than in all ancient Rome and Greece”. His parents first discovered his talent for drawing when he reproduced a Picasso painting on the cover of a monograph they had given him for his twelfth birthday. He became friends with figures like Robert Rauschenberg, travelling with him to Europe and North Africa in 1952. By 1957 he went to Rome and quickly adopted Classical themes in his painting before marrying an Italian heiress who was the sister of a wealthy patron of the arts in the city. He lived out much of his life in the city in a palazzo near the Farnese where he worked at a happy seclusion from the Abstract Expressionists he had left behind in New York. His real fame would only come in 1987 when an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery opened the floodgates for widespread critical acclaim. 

The first room of the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery does not quite convey the full dissonance of the works displayed: we are greeted with two curving octagons by Twombly which contain a sea in whipping, vivid hunter green slashes and whites, both threateningly alive when compared to the pastoral calm of the Poussin works – a mellow-coloured Roman road with reclining peasants and another low-lit piece, The Arcadian Shepherds. The shepherds in this piece are uncovering an hidden tomb bearing  the inscription: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ . The rustic idyll of these shepherds, and the clashing spray of the Twombly octagons, are both challenged by this reminder of mortality.    

What immediately proceeds is an assault on the senses. The carefully sculptural forms of Poussin with their immediately perceptible rigidities of form are shattered by the white noise of Arcadia with its scribbling on white paper. More successful is the ‘Pan and the Bacchanalia’ section, where we see a liver-coloured smear from Twombly that seems part wine, part excreta mirror the excesses of Bacchus. On the opposite wall we see the same subject handled with a corresponding formality by Poussin. The effect is a tension release.

The final work by Twombly is his The Four Seasons, 1960-1964. This room is a pleasure after the rigours of such an exhibition, and fittingly my favourite was autumn. The mellow fruitfulness [he was a big fan of Keats] is well captured, with a hint of a deeper arterial sap also on the palette. Catch this show while you can, even if you choose to ignore the comparisons and enjoy each artist in his own right.

On a Goan beach in my head

‘Love’ written on her belly in wet cinder
Wiped across with a calm palm
Cool dawn on her bloom-head, rose ash on her lids
I’ll sing you a ballad to make you mine
Rock you in a hammock if you’ll let me
Give you an apple in your hand very gently
Cover you in kisses as the birds fill the space the dark left
With noise

Du-Bro-Vnik

The rat, pinned in its own buoyancy
In the bay of the old port,
Splayed flayed white
By the black minnows:
Sleek, whipping and pernicious
As a widow’s eye.
Dawn dubbed St Blaise a butterfly blue
As he drew his legs around his shield
Like a cupid Caravaggio;
Later, outside the city walls -
The dun peach sea ahead -
To the left, the waves’ upcurl
Looked like a million silver bowls
Reaching up to God.
A bunch of gleaming things
But what I kept was
The rat and its dozen squirming reapers
Screaming the indifference
Of something I had thought was beautiful.