From playing a blood-weeping Bond villain in 2006’s Casino Royale to his repeated collaborations with directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) and Susanne Bier (After The Wedding), Danish-born actor Mads Mikkelsen has carved out a respected niche on both sides of the pond. He can come out of questionable blockbuster material unscathed – as his recent turns in Clash of the Titans and The Three Musketeers demonstrate – and elevate good material with his relentlessly compelling, peculiarly intense screen presence.

Django Bates ascribes the variety of musical influences at play in his work to his childhood - growing up listening to his father's remarkably eclectic record collection. In the first part of my conversation with Django, he talks about Loose Tubes, StoRMChaser and his new post at Bern University of the Arts.

Born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1960, Django Bates is a self-taught composer and founder member of the seminal big band Loose Tubes (1983-1990). As well as leading his own groups, Human Chain and Delightful Precipice, he has composed works for the Brodsky Quartet, Joanna MacGregor, Evelyn Glennie, the Britten Sinfonia and the Dutch Metropole Orchestra, amongst others. In 1997, Bates was awarded the prestigious Jazzpar prize, known as the 'Nobel Prize of Jazz' (previous recipients include Lee Konitz, Roy Haynes and Geri Allen).

Neneh Cherry has never been conventional. The singer and rapper's latest album is a collaboration with The Thing, a Swedish free jazz trio who have previously tackled songs by PJ Harvey and The White Stripes. If anything, the presence of Cherry has made them braver: The Cherry Thing features reworkings of The Stooges' "Dirt", Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" and MF Doom's "Accordion". It's gutsy stuff, but it works. The album already sounds like a contender for the end of year lists.

Rumer has recently returned to public life. Her new album, Boys Don’t Cry, is a collection of songs from the Seventies by male singers such as Townes Van Zandt, Leon Russell, Tim Hardin and Jimmy Webb. Her interpretations, as with her 2010 debut album of original material, Seasons of my Soul, are coated in the icing of classic easy listening – the smoothness of The Carpenters or Carole King springs to mind – yet there’s the kernel of something pointed, heartfelt, even painful, at its core.

Carlos Saura is 80, though he looks 60. With a lived-in face and straggly grey hair, he resembles a rebel professor on a 1970s campus. He’s garrulous and speaks a rolling, recklessly elided Spanish. He’s had seven children by four women, one of them Geraldine Chaplin, the actor-clown’s fourth child. This old man from Aragon—he was born in Huesca—has a self-evident lust for life.

Gary Numan (born Gary Webb, 1958) was born in Hammersmith and raised in the western outskirts of London, the son of a bus driver. By the latter half of the Seventies he was fronting punk band Tubeway Army but his fortunes changed dramatically when he added synthesizers to the formula and became, with the album Replicas and songs such as “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, one of electro-pop’s great innovators. His coldly catchy music, sci-fi imagery, adenoidal voice and air of robotic isolation was hugely influential.

Spoek Mathambo is one the year's brightest new hopes. From Johannesburg but based in Sweden, Spoek (real name Nthato Mokgata) plays with genres like few others. He makes radical, sometimes disjointed music, some of which - like his new single “Let Them Talk” from his recently released album Father Creeper - you can actually dance to.

A boy alone in his vast white bedroom has a recurrent haunting dream, frightening yet somehow comforting - a swan invades his mind, simultaneously menacing him with its power and wildness, and yet wrapping its great wings around him to shield him, with some ambiguous kind of love. It's the opening scene of Matthew Bourne's tremendous modern version of Swan Lake, and that resonant image and the tale he unfolds from it has made it a classic of modern theatre, marvelled at around the world.

My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. There will be a few decent songs, too.