After endless deliberation over who the winner of this ‘enigmatic’, ‘diverse’ and frankly bizarre award could be, last Friday night 26-year-old British-French Benjamin Clementine won the 2015 Mercury Prize for his album At Least For Now.

Supposedly an ‘underdog’– that is to say, the British press did not whip up a huge amount of hysteria around his album – the bookies still foresaw the likelihood of his unlikely success, as it were: allegedly, half of the bets placed since the Tuesday prior to the announcement were in Clementine’s favour.

If Wikipedia classed my music as avant-garde, minimal, art-rock, rock opera, expressionist, chamber pop, classical, folk and spoken word – all at once – I wouldn’t be holding it together like Clementine is. But in many ways these sorts of terms are restrictions; exactly what the Mercury Prize is not about. Clementine’s Nina Simone like vocals (in range and pure soulfulness) are daubed with tenderness. This sonic fragility is placed in counterpoint with dynamic classical piano. He both sings and speaks on songs, of melodies that are not at all obvious – often the rhythms seem to unsettle the piano lines and, only at the last minute, fall together into disturbingly moving sequences.

It is easy to see why, even amongst 11 other groundbreaking nominated records, Clementine won it. His record transfigures genre boundaries, these transgressions assumedly representative of his eclectic life, non-conformist adolescence and early musical career. For Clementine left his London school at 16, moved to Paris at 19, and busked around the Place de Clichy before stumbling across an agent. This sincere realism is heard throughout the album.

Several weeks ago, for this paper, I deliberated the necessity for music prizes at all. But perhaps the idea of a ‘winner’ isn’t important. Speaking to presenter Lauren Laverne, judge Corinne Bailey Rae argued that the shortlist is the most important thing about this prize. And perhaps she’s right. No matter the notes that escape Clementine and his piano – no matter if you’d have preferred an artist of a completely different sound and temperament to win – Clementine represents one of 12 nominated musicians (whom he courteously invited up on stage with him), who in turn stand for a segment of the creativity of our generation.

During his humbling acceptance speech, Clementine said, “I know it’s about the music, but I want to dedicate this to what happened in Paris”, the city that spawned his musical career. Drowned by this sincerity, Clementine broke down into a startling display of compassion. And it was only when he played again, allowing himself to be engulfed by the song, that Clementine filled with hope once more.

This expression of humanity encapsulates what this industry of ours should be about. Musical subjectivity is rife here, but as an intelligent, considerate human being, Clementine stands for us all. Perhaps music and humanity are not such different things after all

Steve Diggle was in a car crash at the age of 17. Tragically, his best friend died aged just 21. This disclosure takes me unawares during my conversation with the legendary Buzzcocks guitarist. “I know the meaning of death now, so I know the meaning of life,” says Steve. The event had a profound effect on him, and from our chat it seems it still influences his world view. Diggle is a very philosophical man – a quality that the best punk bands bring to the biting lyricism of the genre.

You probably have heard the Buzzcocks, if only from the Shrek 2 soundtrack – ‘Ever Fallen in Love with Someone’ is their timeless classic. Diggle has been the band’s bassist, guitarist and vocalist at various points since their formation in 1975, and although he has never seen Shrek 2, the Buzzcocks have always championed ordinary kids, making music for everyone. This even extends to their tendency for non-gendered lyrics. There are very few ‘she’s or ‘he’s used in their songs: “We were doing the non-gender lyrics before Morrissey or The Smiths” Steve tells me. Bored of the semi-sexist ‘baby baby baby’s of Motown, Buzzcocks provide a “fusion of stories about guys and girls that anyone can relate to”.

Besides rummaging through their parents’ record collection, most people get to know the Buzzcocks nowadays through their touring. Their new album The Way is a flexing of their muscles. Steve tells me that The Way wasn’t intended to please the fans of the old stuff, but that doesn’t stop the crowd’s yells for ‘Orgasm Addict’, ‘Boredom’ and all the classics. Buzzcocks made it big on the release of their debut EP Spiral Scratch in the late Seventies, with the aim to produce (in Steve’s words) “the most uncommercial music possible”. The title is taken from the term for personalised etchings scratched onto records by the engineers. It was a reminder of the human involvement in music production. I ask Diggle if he is nostalgic for that physicality of music. He declares that it was a “magical time” when you had to save up for the longed-for vinyl, go out, buy it and handle the sleeve and needle with tender care. Diggle deems today’s internet a “box of chocolates” but one that can make you sick. Too much means less for Diggle, and not just musically.

Strolling around London, Diggle feels great alienation, with little beyond towering glass buildings reflecting in his eyes. As a proud Mancunian, he laments the same trend in his home city: “The bigger the buildings get, the smaller the people get.” His rich accent prompts me to ask how pivotal the regional focus to the punk scene was, but he answers more personally. “I never felt London was any better off…I wouldn’t be the same…I was so glad I was born in Manchester.”

Immensely grateful for that “lovely homegrown working class spirit”, Diggle insists that “there’s a warmth in the North” as well as “a lot of beauty and struggle.” He remembers the steel works and coal mines and tells me of his love of D.H. Lawrence. The song ‘You Know You Can’t Help It’ is actually taken from a line of Lawrence’s poetry. Sex is a silly thing to do, states the song; it’s a ridiculous physical act, but people do it anyway.

Punk sprang from rebellion; early punk, in particular, was a very intense time. The nation was shocked by the screaming guitars, gutsy lyrics and radical sounds. According to Diggle, punk “swept the country like a carpet bomb”, forcing people to change how they thought about music. I’m interested to know what the Buzzcocks song ‘Boredom’ is really about. Is it just a general attack on the status quo, or did it reveal a boredom with the punk scene itself? Diggle says the “musical climate” was poor, nothing happened for quite a few years, there was nothing exciting for younger people. And so their famous track was produced.

When I see the punk royalty play in sleepy home-county Harpenden, they open their set with ‘Boredom’. A sea of balding men with moobs went crazy (I lowered the average age in the town hall considerably). Having chatted to Diggle previously, I was really proud of him; his energy knew no end, the sinews in his neck strained and I’ve still never seen anyone handle a guitar like him. He told me that in the last couple of years he has got more involved in the audience; he wants to know what they’re doing, breaking down barriers, promoting the ultimate punk sentiment.

In the early Nineties, Kurt Cobain asked Diggle how he had survived so long. He replied, “A sense of humour”, and Cobain shot himself a few days later (no, Courtney did not do it. Sorry, but no). I think the (northern) humour is why the fans remain. As Diggle says, “we can rock out with the best of them” but also, “we can be heavy and serious and philosophical.” I tentatively use the word ‘legend’ and Diggle acknowledges it is complimentary but insists it’s just a synonym for longevity: “No one’s given us an award or anything…it’s not like we’re the rock gods and untouchable…it’s just about the songs really…I don’t get on stage to be loved, or for fame, or anything. You wanted to reflect a bit of society and put two fingers up to the world too”

Known for his major contributions to theatre in the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht wrote with his distinct political aims and convictions in mind. His commitment to Marxism is evident in a large handful of his works, and Die Maßnahme (‘The Decision’) provides us with a solid example of Brecht’s political theatre.

Four communist Agitators appear in front of their party in Moscow, reporting the death of a comrade that they themselves have shot. Over the course of eight scenes, the four Agitators attempt to justify their decision to shoot their Young Comrade on the basis that his behaviour both endangered them, and jeopardized their attempts to spread communist propaganda amongst workers in China.

We plunge into the action straight away, with the death of the Young Comrade being reported at the outset. This develops into a rapidly-progressing plot which jumps from episode to episode; from here we observe an account of the events that lead to the death of the Young Comrade, acted out and explained by the four Agitators. This pace however causes no issues – Die Maßnahme is written in a lucid, explicit style that ensures our understanding of the events portrayed.

The episodic structure of Die Maßnahme could be seen, however, as resulting in a somewhat disjointed plot. Instead of flowing into one another, scenes are snapshots of the Agitators’ experiences. This eradicates any sense of continuity; the plot is contained in chunks rather than in scenes that flow into one another. On the other hand, this technique of Brecht’s ensures that we focus intensely on each scene as we read it, further contributing to the clarity of the events in Die Maßnahme.

Perhaps the most appealing feature of this work is its wealth of rich themes and ideas, all of which provoke the reader to consider these central elements of the play. Can the Agitators’ actions be justified? Should the Young Comrade have obeyed party orders, or was he correct to conduct himself according to his raw emotions? It is such questions that Brecht brings to the surface through the politically-charged plot of Die Maßnahme, one of his Lehrstücke (‘teaching plays’), which aims to push readers to seriously assess their attitudes to what they have read.

On the whole, Brecht’s Die Maßnahme is a gripping, thought-provoking work. Its clear writing style, albeit not entirely fluid, ensures that the reader is explicitly presented with the key ideas found in the text. The experience of reading Die Maßnahme does not simply stop after the last line – the controversy portrayed in the plot stays with each reader after the shut of the book. The portrayal of difficult yet engaging ideas in Die Maßnahme makes it a must-read for any fan of political theatre.

What’s wrong with a good confession? Confessing might imply a kind of weakness of character in yielding to pressure. It also intrinsically involves the divulging of really personal details or remembrances. Its traditional, religious connotations meant the confession was framed in terms of immoral and regretted experience. However, in our age of reality TV, tabloids and social media, the meaning of confession today veers more towards a self-indulgent, salacious and enjoyable ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic/Teenage Drama Queen’ type of tone.

This culture of superficial, gossip-worthy confessions is not, as you might expect, contradicted by modern female popular literary and cultural icons of the moment such as Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Meghan Daum, Rebecca Solnit, Marina Keegan, Katherine Angel, Leslie Jamison and Zadie Smith in their literary essays. Rather, what might be considered private trivialities or particularly gruesome, humiliating or personal physical and mental functions often become the sole focus from which the intellectual waves of the essay ripple outwards.

So part of the reason why I disagree with Cheryl Strayed’s opinion, voiced in the New York Times recently, that “as long as we still have reason to wedge ‘women’ as a qualifier before ‘essayist’, the age is not exactly golden” is because she didn’t take the time to properly investigate her more interesting follow-up statement that “and yet it’s hard to deny there’s something afoot. Essayists who happen to be women are having a banner year.” I think there is something about the essay that is particularly suited to expressing the female experience, and for fulfilling the feminist desire to break down patriarchal structures inherent in our language and culture. The ability of the essay to incorporate the female confession into a framework of logical analysis forces the audience into realising what is universal about the seemingly ‘petty’ truths of everyday female experience. And everyone, especially in a time where menstruation is still shunned and perceived to be a ‘luxury’, needs to acknowledge the importance of the individual female experience to society as a whole.

Leslie Jamison’s ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ works towards such an accessible, persuasive and coherently considered feminist thought process. By juxtaposing several experiences alongside each other in numbered case studies, including several very personal confessions of “faint lines further up, at the base of my leg, where I used to cut myself with a razor”, Jamison is able to expose the clear similarities in different women’s experiences of pain, while not diminishing the individual and personal importance of each. Similarly, in ‘Empathy Exams’ she is able to fluidly negotiate between two bodily experiences – a heart operation and an abortion – to draw out threads of subjective truths that are objectively considered: “one was my choice and the other wasn’t; both made me feel – at once – the incredible frailty and capacity of my own body; both came in a bleak winter; both left me prostrate under the hands of men, and dependent on the care of a man I was just beginning to love.”

The confessional essay is also well-suited to young feminist writers because of its ironic self-reflexivity. The personal essay collection often claims itself to be unassuming, incomplete, and dismissible, as in Mindy Kaling’s Q&A with an imagined potential buyer in her introduction, one of whom questions, “I don’t know. I have a lot of books already. I wanted to finish those Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books before the movies come out.” To which her answer is, “This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.” Yet her novel ends on another Q&A whereby the imagined reader asks “Why didn’t you talk about whether women are funny or not?” which she answers by saying that “I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tactic approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn’t.”

This statement of a stern feminist philosophy which has seemingly run throughout what is occasionally presented as a haphazard collection of spontaneous musings presses on the reader the framework in which all of Kaling’s confessions exist: that of a hugely successful and intelligent writer whose parodic list of movies that “someone is pitching somewhere in Hollywood” ends with a half-serious reminder of her actual fame and position as a notable comic: “as much as it may seem like I am mocking these movies, if any movie studio exec is reading this and is interested in any of the above, I will gladly take a meeting about them.”

Lena Dunham also reflects on her own fame and position within the canon, and is similarly half-deprecating and half staunchly unapologetic about her success, even in her introduction: “I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or thinking that it was your fault when the person you are dating suddenly backs away, intimidated by the clarity of your personal mission here on earth.” Therefore the embarrassed tone of the confession in these modern feminist autobiographical essays are used as counterpoints to the relative position of huge success and progress from which they are voiced.

So each essay relates to its predecessor on a continuum, however the author is allowed, and encouraged, to reflect and change in the blank space between the two. Keegan’s collection always makes us awake of what could have been, Kaling’s is signed off “See you guys soon”, and Dunham’s is subtitled ‘A young woman tells you what she’s ‘learned’’ – each pointing towards themselves as writers in the midst of a promising career.

The uncertainty, and therefore the constant hopefulness, of the confessional essay is undeniably suited to the changeable and undefinable nature of the young, female experience. Go read them all.

As Peep Show enters its final series, fans of the show are happy and heavy-hearted in equal measure. Happy because, after a three-year hiatus, perennial losers Mark and Jez, an anal loan manager and juvenile waster who live together out of purgatorial necessity, are back on television in all of their tragic glory. Heavy-hearted because this series marks the end of twelve years of stagnant careers, disastrous relationships, untold social faux-pas, and eating the occasional dead dog. Yet, viewers can take solace in the ever-insightful words of Jeremy, referring to a bouquet of flowers he’s bought for Big Suze – “They’ll die eventually, but everything does, doesn’t it? Apart from love, a true love. A good love can sustain you all the way through.” Though it may be coming to an end, a good love of the remarkably re-watchable and quotable Peep Show can continue to sustain you.

And it is a real love that fans hold for the show, which has gained a cult following. Written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Peep Show is perhaps most notably distinctive for its point-of-view filming style, which constantly alternates between the characters’ faces. While this technique may have originally jarred, seeming occasionally dizzying and disorientating, it allowed for the trademark of a sitcom that has come to define a generation: the excruciatingly honest internal monologues that articulate often unspeakable but unfalteringly comical thoughts – “How do I feel? Empty, check. Scared, check. Alone, check. Just another ordinary day.”

In their voyeuristic frankness, it is these thoughts that make the show so worryingly, yet somehow comfortingly, relatable, revealing the inward selfishness, warped morality, and loneliness of the characters. In season three, Mark tells Jeremy he’s proposing to his girlfriend, Sophie, and Jeremy immediately thinks: “How does this affect me?” The way in which the sitcom embraces these grimly realistic qualities – the awkwardness of sex, the simultaneous excitement and stupidity of drugs, the unspoken nervousness and cynicism with which we greet so many people and social situations – gives it unrivalled and darkly accessible hilarity, perhaps best encapsulated by Mark’s adage, “I suppose doing things you hate is just the price you pay to avoid loneliness.”

The writers utilise the perpetual hopelessness of our generation for maximum comic effect, cultivating sharp comedy from the inescapable greyness of the everyday – the anxiety of being confronted by local youths and called a ‘clean shirt’, the sad satisfaction derived from the frugality of having the boiler on a mild twenty-one degrees, and the outrage at the decision to order ‘four naans’ at an Indian. Bain and Armstrong also skillully engineer scenes of somehow believable ridiculousness: Mark’s turkey rant at Christmas, the grotesque ‘bad thing’ at Jeremy’s shroom party, Mark hiding on his wedding day as Jez uncontrollably wets himself, and the pair vandalising a music executive’s caravan at a Christian rock festival. The show’s colourful secondary characters supplement this: Alan Johnson, a recklessly confident corporate manager with motivational maxims including “Fuck a chicken if that’s what it takes. Watch a chicken fucking a horse”, and Super Hans, Jez’s band-mate with a crack addiction, a part-time job on an oil rig, and unseen twin children who were “fünf, zwei years ago”.

In the first episode of the new series, aired last week, the comedy was true to form, with a blend of the drearily ordinary, as Mark grinds through a new bank job, and the entertainingly outrageous, as the self-styled ‘Croydon Bullingdon’ waterboard Mark’s erstwhile flatmate, Jerry, with a sleeping bag and a Budweiser tinny. Somehow, it couldn’t finish any other way.