At 1h 20min, Lone Scherfig’s One Day (2011) presents what ought to, by Hollywood movie standards, constitute climax and resolution: the big kiss. It’s the kind of scene that would, were this a 1990s movie and the character of Dexter played by Hugh Grant, entail a gentle pull back, unobtrusively allowing Paris to swell around the at-last-united lovers while they savoured that swooning embrace. The sun would blaze, or the rain would pour, or the leaves would fall in swirls of amber and gold. The image would linger. The premise upon which the genre is built — that love is a happy inevitability — would stand firm.

But Scherfig directed her adaptation of David Nichols’s bestselling novel during this millennium, and the Danish director has never been known to toe the line of convention. Jim Sturgess plays Dexter. Unlike Grant — who only attempted the “bad guy” persona in Bridget Jones’s Diary after safely securing his Loveable Brit reputation in a slew of rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill — Sturgess has no aversion to playing a leading man who, for at least three-fifths of the movie, is most accurately described as obnoxious. He performs opposite Anne Hathaway, who brings her usual witty warmth to the part of Emma.

Anyway: the scene. Following this kiss, we find ourselves, not fading away to a credits sequence cheerfully soundtracked by Elvis Costello (as might be expected), but suctioned back to London. Time has moved forward a year. Dexter and Emma are elated. This is life post-Happily Ever After; and, as they snuggle in the harbour of Dexter’s fledgling business, finally cohesive after nearly two decades of will-they-won’t-they torment, “After” looks as blissful as you’d hope for.

Then time moves forward a little bit more. They are struggling slightly: fertility problems. Emma is in a bad mood; Dexter makes an effort to quell it. Hope prevails anyway, because these two, we know, are meant to be together; and now they finally know it too, nothing can compromise their destiny as soulmates.

Then Emma dies.

When I first watched One Day, I was sixteen. I hated it intensely. It cheated me. The ending felt unfair, like a punch in the gut after an arduous, heart-wrenching, ultimately dissatisfying uphill journey (and Rotten Tomatoes confirms I wasn’t alone in this verdict). Dexter was an idiot. Emma deserved better. Dexter should have realised on graduation night, or at least soon after they had left university, that he and Emma were a “perfect union of opposites”, just like the slightly tacky tattoo stamped next to his ankle. Why did Emma waste her time on him, when she so clearly had at least double his IQ? Meanwhile, Dexter — supposedly the leading man — spent a considerable portion of the narrative off his face on cocaine. Sorry, but could you imagine Hugh Grant or Colin Firth doing the same?

To top it all off, Emma’s death totally unhinged the symbiosis that I, having grown up on a diet of Richard Curtis movies, felt was necessary to give a ‘romcom’ or ‘chick flick’ (terms I am reluctant to assign movies, but mildly indicative nonetheless) satisfying completion. What was the point of making a film about romance, only to shatter the fantasy with a brutally unforgiving ending, soaked in unassailable grief?

As time has moved along in my own life, however, my feelings toward the movie have changed dramatically. It is now, by far, my favourite in its genre. The difficulty of the film is, despite much critical resistance, actually its greatest coup: it presents a desirable and undesirable form of love in one package. Desirable because their love endures time. Undesirable for the same reason. That, of course, is the power of its structure, which is both Scherfig’s achievement and Nichols’s. When other movies have taken up with similar themes — “philandering guy’s best female friend is perfect for him; it takes him a while (and, usually, the threat of losing her to somebody else) to see the situation clearly”— the temporal design in those movies has often been significantly less harrowing.

Take, for instance, Made of Honor (2008). Here, Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan play the fated pals in that familiar When Harry Met Sally (1989) style. This movie is, in many ways, a tribute to that one, and to the indefatigable backdrop of New York City; where, for every yellow cab caught in traffic, there is apparently an epic romance waiting to be served up in schmaltz and polystyrene coffee cups, with just a hint of Sinatra on the side. As in One Day, Made of Honor builds its story on the supposedly universal truth that Harry delivers to Sally: “men and women can’t ever just be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” In that earlier movie, over one hour of our time / several years of theirs passes, and sex does indeed get in the way. Sally hates Harry, which of course means she loves him, and Harry’s life confirms his own truth. Reconciliation ensues.

(Companionship x Forever) + Sex = Happy Ending.

Of course, Harry’s “truth” is a wholly reductive one: real life amply demonstrates how men and women can sustain platonic relationships. But for the purposes of the friendships which are sculpted into sellable movies, there is always a latent erotic impulse churning away under the leads’ interactions. Made of Honor establishes the foundations for Tom and Hannah’s friendship in a perfunctory teaser scene at the beginning, before glibly skipping over time: everything that happens onscreen from hereon in occurs ten years ahead, with the movie’s director mercifully sparing us an excruciating, decade-spanning trajectory of missed opportunities. It’s enough to anchor Tom and Hannah to the past without dwelling on it; unlike One Day, the texture of this movie — light, slick, capery — would not have borne that well. In Made of Honor, it is sufficient simply to know that best friends are always meant for one another because films like When Harry Met Sally have already told us so.

For me, this blurs the dichotomy between blessing and curse. Made of Honor is easy, palatable, enjoyable viewing, because the weight of time doesn’t press as suffocatingly on us as it does in One Day. One Day is many things to me, but I would never describe it as “easy”. On the other hand, Made of Honor‘s structure carves a hollowness into the alchemy between Tom and Hannah, which for Dexter and Emma is impossible: their blossoming is too often on the cusp, and the relatively short time they spend aware of their status as soulmates, compared to the time we spend knowing it while watching them suffer through subpar romantic entanglements, is what makes the abrupt termination of that relationship so absolutely traumatic. True, When Harry Met Sally also forces us to suffer the bittersweetly compelling motions of time; but the tour through the years pays off when we see them riding off into the metaphorical sunset together. One Day gives us that sweet relief only to snatch it away again.

What, exactly, is so appealing about such narratives? It seems absurdly narrow-sighted to assume they merely satiate a masochistic impulse in audience members who identify with Emma. Not everyone who enjoys these films harbours a suppressed desire to build their life with a member of the opposite sex whom they happen to be close friends with (though I’m aware plenty do). Yet moviemakers, and the novelists or storytellers they collaborate with, return to this bare thread of love and explore it repeatedly. Why?

One supposes that movie producers seek such stories out because they confirm a reassuring vision of love: one where chemistry is a social thing before it is a physical one. Sexual tension in these movies is paramount, but sex itself is subordinate to the primary USP of the focal relationship: the emotional bond between the characters. The reactive senses of humour, the mutually-serviceable altruism, and above all, the proven ability to go through the worst of times and come out at the end with an undiminished need to share space in each other’s lives — such is the stuff of most fantasies, and also, incidentally, the ingredients required to brew a fairly sparkling screenplay. The dialogue between friends, you might notice in most films, is usually far bouncier than the dialogue between straight-up lovers. It’s odd, but possibly a little telling about the human condition, that cinema wants to assure us so badly that it really isn’t always about what’s hot. In these limited, crystallised cinematic versions of heterosexual romance, the secondariness of sex itself is oddly vital.

As for One Day, it ascends beyond those it shares characteristics with precisely because it refuses to dance to the piper. I interviewed Scherfig once and asked her why her movies tend towards nonconventional denouements. Her reply? “It’s the choice between the Hollywood ending… or something more complex”. Not every director sets out a vision of their work which accurately corresponds with what we see onscreen, but I feel for Scherfig, who has always avoided the occasionally stifling cogs and wheels of L.A., this is a true representation of a consistent commitment found across her curriculum vitae. One Day is a template solution to the oft-cited problem of the “death of the rom-com”: a film which dares to present true romance as something we really can miss out on. Dexter’s story — for, in the end, One Day is one man’s bildungsroman — is the tale, not of how we fall in love, but of how we live in love, even when we’re blind to it.

Don’t wait forever, the film gently urges. Because, ultimately, your fairytale is your own responsibility. Or, as Dexter and Emma remark: an orgy won’t keep you warm at night, and an orgy won’t look after you when you’re old. A friend, on the other hand…

Should you have four hours to spare any time soon (unlikely, but still), there are worse things you could do than grace Once Upon a Time in America with your attention. If it sounds vaguely familiar, that may be because Italian classical singer Andrea Bocelli recently duetted with pop singer Ariana Grande on a fairly successful interpretation of a famous piece from Ennio Morricone’s original score for the movie. The song is very lovely, but does slight justice to the original in context. Morricone is a film composer of deserved erudition, and this is, arguably, his most devastating score.

But there are other reasons for visiting this movie besides wanting to access Morricone’s musical arrangements.

Put simply, to visit and revisit Once Upon a Time in America is to aid its healing process — a collaborative effort that has been underway for over two decades now. The movie is one of the most tragic cases in cinema history; its production/reception and its fraught, fragile relationship with time outside the film only helps to colour the thematising of time that goes on within the film, making it, especially in context, one of the most painfully beautiful works of art in western cinema.

It began life as a passion project of the grandest, most Italian kind, as befits a movie directed by Sergio Leone, who is perhaps better known for adding his particular brand of glamour to ‘spaghetti westerns’ like Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It was, in fact, to be his first and only venture away from that genre. Leone spent seven years fomenting his translation Harry of Grey’s book, The Hoods. It was his last movie; upon its completion and release, he retired from the business and died shortly afterwards. That he never lived to see the movie rehabilitated and restored to some of its former glory (the film re-premiered at Cannes in 2012, thanks to the painstaking efforts of committed cinephile Martin Scorsese) only adds to the peculiar poignancy of its story.

The film is a gangster film, although that definition should be used cautiously; yes, it is a movie about a small brotherhood of Jewish mobsters who make it big, and lose it all, in prohibitionera New York. But to paraphrase what Jean Baudrillard said about the U.S.A.: only non-Americans can actually “see” America for what it really is, and, more crucially, isn’t. Leone was not born and raised in the States the way that, say, Scorsese was, and so his America is product of a romanticising outsider’s imagination. Despite its cold brutality in some places, and its sheer violence in others, there is an ineffable quality to this movie which largely obscures the criminality of the main characters from view.

Instead, Leone communicates an eloquent love letter to that concept which he, as a European, could appreciate but never wholly grasp — the American Dream. Its fatalities and flaws are rendered as beautifully as its ideals. For Leone, the American Dream is mediated by and intersected through friendship, family and loyalty, and so what we get is not a gangster film so much as a film about a gang. It is unlike any other movie in its genre; in fact, it is barely of its genre, and perhaps one of the best genre films ever made because of that. Had the fates not intervened, and Once Upon a Time in America gotten the recognition it deserved, it might have even eclipsed The Godfather and reigned the landscape of mobster films.

Tonini’s cinematography is lyrical and hazy, just like the music and just like memory itself: the central motif of the whole film. Starring Robert de Niro as Noodles, James Woods as Max, and Elizabeth McGovern as Deborah — with a teenage Jennifer Connelly in her breakout role as McGovern’s younger self — Once Upon a Time in America obsesses over the implications and biases of time throughout. De Niro’s elderly protagonist arrives in New York with a mystery invitation after several decades’ absence; in extended flashbacks, which become a theme in their own right, the man’s life, from childhood through to twilight years, is more or less comprehensively conveyed. Regret, growth, change, return: all become the fabric woven into the movie’s tapestry. It’s indulgent, but not irritatingly so. Pauline Kael called it kitsch, but she said it in a way to suggest even kitsch has its merits.

Yet, ironically, that flashback structure — the central hinge upon which the film hangs its meaning — was denied the film upon its entry to the US (it initially debuted a ‘European cut’ which had already excised over two hours’ of Leone’s footage; the director deemed this version an acceptable contraction of his epic vision). The Ladd Company, who were distributing the movie in the States, went against the director’s will and shaved down those 220+ minutes to a meagre 139; they also distorted the sequence of the film to give it a more linear structure. Through attempts to make the order of things more logical, they effectively annihilated everything the film stood for. Kael called it “one of the worst cases of [film] mutilation” she had ever seen; certainly the movie bombed at the box office, and it never recovered the gravitas its initial European cut deserved — at least not until many years later, and with Leone too long gone to see it.

The scars may never fully disappear, but one likes to think the movie’s wounds have largely healed by now: the restoration was met with great enthusiasm from cinema enthusiasts and professionals alike, and the movie’s quiet cult following over the decades has ensured its blossoming into a contender on many “greatest gangster movies” lists. Yet the cautionary tale of both the movie’s interior and exterior history dances through it like a spectre that cannot disappear: time, always, is running out.

If you don’t know James Woods, well, don’t worry about it. You’re not alone. The sixty-eight-year-old is one of those actors: the ones so good at what they do, you miss their star quality, either because they’ve sunk into a role so deeply it’s obscured their celebrity potential, or because they’ve played fiercely against a bigger billing name — occasionally acting their opponent off the screen. Think Gary Oldman or Ralph Fiennes: Woods is their precursor.

What’s particularly bittersweet about Woods is that the late recognition which finally found Oldman and Fiennes has pretty much evaded him. He’s a household name… but only if you happen to live in the kind of household which devours Hollywood trivia. Early in his career, Woods earned an Oscar nomination for starring in Salvador. Otherwise, he seems to have paved his way playing supporting roles to their maximum hilt. You probably saw him most recently — if you’re inclined toward big, blustery action movies — as the dastardly nemesis to Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx in White House Down. The sexagenarian casually ought-toughs the testosterone levels of both current Hollywood heavyweights, and brings some class to an otherwise ludicrous movie.

It’s not, however, the film you want to watch if you want to see a master at work. For that, there is a back catalogue of intuitive performances from a man who’s more than happy to give you reasons not to like him. Try the one which earned him yet another Academy nod: Ghosts of Mississippi (1996). Or the one which caught him on the cusp of his career: as Barbra Streisand’s weakling beta college boyfriend in 1973’s The Way We Were.

Yet, for Woods’s talent to earnestly shine, the two movies to check out are Martin Scorsese’s seminal Casino (1995) and Sergio Leone’s tragically underrated Once Upon a Time in America (1984); in both, Woods plays opposite the actor in whose shadow he has often stood, Robert de Niro. In Casino, Woods’s feral, slimy turn as Sharon Stone’s waster childhood dream-boy is just the right brand of vacuous charm to aggravate de Niro’s jealousy.

Rewind a decade, and you find Woods giving the performance of his lifetime. Once Upon a Time in America examines the tight but taut friendship between two hoods-turned-prohibition gangsters in the New York projects. As Max, de Niro’s vicious, calculating, ambitiously greedy best friend, Woods manages to refract himself through just enough of the protagonist’s sympathy to give a truly nuanced performance. Initially the movie was even meant to centre on Max, before it shifted to become a vehicle for de Niro, and the intensity Woods pulses through the screen is a rare glimpse into a raucous screen charisma that later directors have sadly failed to capitalise on.

Meanwhile, if you need a good answer for, say, BBC’s Pointless, it can’t hurt to know that Woods was the voice of Hades in Disney’s Hercules. Villainous indeed.

Riots occur when a group of individuals feels powerless. When a movement’s requests go unheeded or forcibly silenced, then action must be taken. However, a major contention against rioting is that when violence escalates, the rioters are deemed out of control, beyond reason, and beyond negotiation. Suffragette portrays both of these arguments in a clever, empowering way.

In the first half, the film establishes the daily life of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan). The opening shot is of wheels turning in perpetual clockwork. The camera zooms out, revealing the cold-coloured laundrette and its panting employees, as voiceovers play of men opposing women’s peaceful protests. Following these voiceovers, there is a creeping sense that the suffragette movement is inescapable. Maud grins at some dolls in a store window, which is smashed within seconds as women in the streets hurl stones and scream, “Votes for women!” She is caught up in a movement from which she would rather abstain, standing in for her friend, Violet (Anne-Marie Duff), to speak to Lloyd George about pay inequality in her workplace. Building layers of tension through the abuse she and her friends face – mainly sexual at the grimy hands of their boss — the woman who once pleaded, “I’m not a suffragette” is pushed to her limit.

While the suffragettes promise sisterhood and solidarity, the purest moments of love occur between Maud and her son, George (Adam Michael Dodd). Maud is not a deranged activist, but a mother motivated by her belief that “there is another way to live this life.” Initially, Maud’s home life seems pleasant, albeit in cramped quarters, with a caring husband who also works at the laundrette. However, as she becomes more invested in the movement, her husband feels he is losing grip on the semblance of stability they once held, and kicks her out. Homeless, Maud’s one request is to see her son; when she is finally able to snag George away for an afternoon out, there is a bittersweet sense of bliss between mother and child.

Along with Maud’s familial rejection, the second half’s most important idea is that the movement is going too far, that Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep) may be leading the movement but is not a goddess, and that blowing up buildings is not the way to get attention. Though Maud herself is a strongwilled activist, she is by no means the most extreme. The extremists begin to decline in health or throw themselves into fatal situations; their intentions are good, the audience is on their side, but ultimately they too are crying out with Maud in the final scene to step back.

On a technical side, biopics have become quite fashionable in the film industry as of late. Not documentaries, but still advertised as “based on a true story”, movies such as The Social Network, Straight Outta Compton, Big Eyes, Love and Mercy and countless others provide audiences with a piece of historical fiction about a previously underappreciated figure. Some may sacrifice fact for drama, be it how a character is depicted or how events unfold, while others remain decently faithful to the story. Too often biopics become over-sentimental and qualify as “Oscar fodder”: a movie that appeals to the Academy’s standards by ostensibly trying to be good; it is popular with the masses, whilst cinephiles will disagree with its accolades. Heartwrenching and topical even today, Suffragette is worth seeing. It is not quite an Oscar-fodder biopic, and if nothing else, it allows audiences to evaluate the merits of rioting on both national and personal levels.

I can pinpoint the moment I fell in love with live music to the moment Jon Fratelli struck the first chord of ‘Chelsea Dagger’. It was my very first gig, aged 13 and I couldn’t have loved it any more. I came out afterwards dripping with beer (hopefully) and enormously happy. The atmosphere had been raw and energetic; completely infectious. My first gig sparked off endless nights at every venue I could find seeing any band I vaguely recognised.

This time it couldn’t have been more different. Nine years have passed since the band released their exceedingly popular Costello Music, which drew in fans with its addictive raucousness and intriguing coarseness. Their latest album, Eyes Wide Tongue Tied, is far more mature. There are hints of country and even a ballad or two, which the front few rows of the crowd belt out just as riotously as ‘Henrietta’.

This change in tone was reflected in the atmosphere of the gig. There was no sign of the mosh pit I had so fondly remembered and the average age had increased from 20 to 40. Jon’s mop of crazy, curly hair had been tamed and a cocked hat covered the majority of his more angular face. There were plenty of early-twenty-somethings like me living out their teenage rock dreams, but just as many middle aged men slowly bobbing at the back. Their voices and music were however more than recognisable. ‘Whistle For The Choir’ was crooned just as effectively and ‘Vince the Loveable Stoner’ drew just as much admiration. However, it is clear that the band is trying to move away from their debut. The focus was very much on their new material, with them even choosing to end the night with a relatively unknown track, demoting the infamous ‘Chelsea’ to languish in the penultimate spot. The American influence on these Scottish lads is still very clear, although it now tends to seep through in elements of Americana that sound more like country than rock and roll, particularly in new tracks like ‘Too Much Wine’. The live performance of their new material (apart from tracks off We Need Medicine, leave those well alone) convinced me that songs like ‘Me and the Devil’ were genuine developments from the recognisable sound of Costello Music.

Perhaps my 13-year-old gig-virgin self simply saw this in an entirely different light to a 21-yearold with 50-odd gigs under her belt. Perhaps these three brothers have actually matured eight years down the line and after their brief hiatus.

In some ways, this is pretty comforting; I’m not the only one who has got older in the last eight years. The Fratellis are growing with their audience; an effective way to avoid the tendency to become a noughties one-hit wonder.

★★★☆☆

 Three Stars

It is safe to say that One Direction has never been a cool or edgy band to like. The disdain and scepticism I have been met with when admitting to liking the band is, quite frankly, tiring, and the arrival of their new album, Made in the A.M., only proves that everyone is being a bit silly. The album is well written, well-produced and the perfect thing to leave fans with as they go on a nearly two-year long break. I would sit up, take notice and give it a serious listen.

Made in the A.M. is a formidable work. ‘A.M.’, the somewhat-eponymous track, plays on the theme established in previous hit singles ‘Up All Night’ and ‘Midnight Memories’, of partying through the night. The change in direction (pun intended) of the band, however, can be seen even here: ‘A.M.’, despite playing off previously established themes, is much more mellow and laidback compared to rocky ‘Midnight Memories’, and poppy, energetic ‘Up All Night’. Other tracks on the new album fit into this theme, with ‘Never Enough’ and ‘Temporary Fix’ echoing previous tracks like ‘No Control’ with a playful sound, but even this is more measured and mature. The more upbeat tracks contrast nicely with ‘Infinity’ and ‘If I Could Fly’, both of which have rather long build-ups , which create a rather mature emotional narrative. Overall, then, a strong set of tracks that deserves to be taken seriously.

The band, in its progression onto newer and better things, is starting to be taken seriously, evidenced by their performance on the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge this week. Creatively, the departure of Zayn Malik hasn’t created a large hole in the group. Does this suggest that the band is merely the product of a well-oiled publicity machine? Or are the boys just capable of moving on and creating a decent sound without his often-unbelievable vocal range?

And what of their upcoming break? Many were shocked, some anguished, at the announcement that One Direction would be taking a break from now until March 2017. The album seems to be a way for the band to wave farewell: the fan contribution to the chorus of ‘History’ seems to be a final thanks, while ‘I Want to Write You a Song’ says a definite goodbye. There does, however, seem to be hope for the future: lines like “we could make some more [music]” are future-facing, giving us grieving fans a light at the end of the tunnel that this is hiatus. Ultimately, though, this album only goes to prove my point that we need to sit up and take notice of One Direction, but not as an insignificant, manufactured band. They have established themselves as talented and sound performers, with self-propelled creative direction. No one is above listening to One Direction.

When Lucy Rose arrives for our interview, she’s fresh off stage from a “stressful” sound check with her band. Having listened in, it seemed that Rose’s intricate, indie-folk sound was firmly intact and as potent as ever. Trialling some material yet to be debuted live, including ‘My Life’, Rose and her band possessed an element of nervousness as they rehearsed, approaching the tracks with a gentle touch, juxtaposed with the intense, beautiful set they would later deliver.

Over halfway through her current UK tour, Rose explains, “It’s been really good. Long…it’s very exciting to get on the road and play music again”. Maintaining a presence on the touring circuit is of upmost importance to Rose, whose modesty is endearing. “All these people in Oxford just found out about us and they’re coming to our shows!” It’s no surprise, however, that Rose’s popularity has reached such exciting levels given that her recent album, Work It Out, reached the Top 10 in the UK charts. “I’m really thrilled with it,” she says, “I don’t really know what it means. The charts are a weird thing. It seems to be fluctuating from week to week, but everyone is obsessed with it. I think I probably sold as many of my first record as the second one and that went Top 15 just because of the charts’ competition each week.”

We begin chatting about the changing nature of the music industry, spotting an edition of the new free NME on the desk. Rose views such developments as “really positive things. But on a side note, more important things are actually if your music’s had a proper connection with people. And if they do buy your record and they do support you by listening to it and coming to gigs, it just means that you get to make another one, hopefully.” I ask whether the new direction taken in her new album was done consciously. “Every interview asks me why this second album sounds so different and I come up with a different reason every time…to be honest I was probably just a bit bored with the acoustic guitar! I’ve been playing it for ten years and I literally just saved up some money and bought a piano and an electric guitar and I had to write on the road. That forced me to try beat makers, and applications that I just hadn’t used on the first record.”

The impression I get is that Rose’s creative process is often a solitary experience. She explains, “I’ve written everything on my own. There are lots of solo artists – especially female solo artists – that get pushed into doing co-writes. I kind of wanted just to prove that females can write their own records, so I was very anti-co-writing for that reason.” She continues, when I mention recent accounts of sexism in the music industry, that, “I do feel like there’s a lot of image-based conversation that happens, which frustrates me greatly. The more appealing you look as a product, the more people are gonna buy into you. I want exposure, but at the same time, if the only exposure I can get is through posters – which are based on the way I look – it’s hard because a picture has to describe the whole of me as an artist and that’s very difficult.”

It becomes clear during the gig that catching her live is the most enticing way to get to know Rose as an artist. She is softly-spoken, yet delivers immense musical gravity as she runs through her set. Opening with quirky ‘Cover Up’ and fan favourite ‘Lines’, Rose and her band are precise from the off. The set is interweaved with her personal album favourites, incorporating the emotional ‘Nebraska’, and ‘She’ll Move’; those tracks “with slightly more depth than the singles we’ve put out”. Stepping out from the acoustic based sound of her first album, the tempo for the night is consistent and indulgent. With near-spotless vocals, Rose has the audience encapsulated by recently released ‘Like an Arrow’. The songs of Work It Out are tinged with the vulnerability that dominates early tracks like ‘Shiver’, garnering strident applause. The triumphs of Lucy Rose’s artistry include her astounding capacity to stun audiences into silence as she plays. A true master of her instruments, she commands attention from centre stage, switching between acoustic and electric guitars, barely leaving the audience a chance to catch its breath as punchier tracks like ‘Middle of the Bed’ and ‘Köln’ feature next. “I enjoy playing music,” Lucy tells me. It is a fact evident as a sincere smile graces her face during encore track ‘Red Face’. Her band tear into it, drums heavy, guitar parts intricate, vocals extraordinary. The night is overpowering in its authenticity, the sentiment of her music dominating the set. The dedication of Rose and her band to truly connecting with their audiences is left in no doubt. So, what does music mean to Lucy Rose? “It’s like a drug, it’s this gamble that you’re always taking and it’s just addictive. There’s something that’s soothing to the soul, playing music.”

★★★★☆

 Four Stars

Garden of Delete is the latest offering from prolific experimental musician Daniel Lopatin and – while the Oneohtrix Point Never style is still clear in his latest work – that doesn’t mean it’s an easy listen.

It tells the story of Ezra – a story that Lopatin has embellished online through Twitter, videos, and various blogs – a humanoid alien. The album itself is a lot like Ezra – mysterious, slightly off-putting, and yet hugely compelling. After the schizophrenic ‘Intro’, we are launched into a track named for the curious hero. ‘Ezra’ is both familiar footing for existing fans of Oneohtrix Point Never and also a perfect introduction to his work to those unfamiliar. The stop-start, glitchy, introductory notes are blurred into the frantic synth of the body of the track by way of a reverb-heavy guitar. It’s impossible to settle into listening to Garden of Despair – there’s something very uneasy about the sounds Lopatin creates, and the abrupt shifts in style keep you on your toes.

‘Sticky Drama’ stands out in this regard – the track starts out calm, with the chiming synths reminiscent of rain, but almost immediately Lopatin’s echoing synths sweep the calm away, replacing it with booming basslines (riffing, he says, on the tropes of EDM he’s picked up on tour), interspersed with death metal drumming and guttural screams.

Garden of Delete is dystopic, manic, and above all else – raw. Each new element Lopatin introduces seems aimed to throw the listener off, and yet the individual dissonance forms an album that is holistically enthralling.

When I sat down to write this article I thought I was well-equipped to confabulate on the topic up for discussion. I am in possession of a vagina. I have actually had a vagina for my whole life. I am fairly sure I know how it works. I think I use it an average amount for someone my age (this is proving quite difficult to empirically confirm).

But, sitting blankly in front of an equally blank Microsoft Word document, I swiftly realised I do not know as much about my vagina as I originally presumed. You see, when we meet people, our first impression of them is how they look. This kind of introduction is denied to women when it comes to our own vaginas. My impression of my vagina is massively inhibited by the fact that it’s inconveniently placed between my thighs. I am pretty inflexible – and I’m fairly certain it’s physically impossible to get your head that far between your legs – so I would have to go to the effort of getting a hand-held mirror to create the conditions for a proper inspection. But I’m also pretty lazy, so that’s not a viable option. Thus, I have never looked my vagina in the eye. The closest I’ve ever got to an eyeful of vagina is the odd cursory glance in any given chrome-plated bathroom accessory that happens to be below hip-height. In fact, I think there might be boys in the world who are better acquainted with my vagina than I am.

Part of this, as I say, is to do with physical positioning. Men might know their penises intimately because – well, they’re just there, aren’t they? Just sort of hanging there, like a weird flaccid windsock on a still day. They’re difficult to ignore. Vaginas, on the other hand, are tucked neatly away, private and internal. Out of sight; out of mind. A school kid will doodle male genitalia all over their friend’s notebook if said friend is looking the other way – doodles so anatomically detailed they include bollocks, shaft, prickly pubes, and a neatly penned dotted line of ejaculate protruding from the head (I say ‘school kids’; in fact this happened to me just the other day in a tutorial. My tute partner managed to draw a dick on my essay when I wasn’t looking. Which is strangely impressive, in its own way. Tutor unimpressed, though).

Yet I’ve never seen the same kind of doodle of a vagina. In fact, in July, BuzzFeed posted a video on their Youtube channel entitled ‘Do You Know What Your Vagina Looks Like?’ In the video, a portrait artist drew pictures of six different women’s vaginas, and each woman had to guess which drawing related to their vagina. Yes, it was an entertaining three minutes and 41 seconds of BuzzFeed’s finest video journalism, but it also highlighted how unused to talking about their vaginas women are.

Likening a vagina to “a very healthy raisin”, or “like two string cheeses” is comedy gold, but the statement from a woman who said “I feel embarrassed that I don’t know as much about myself as I feel I should”, and the words of another who said “I’ve never looked at my vagina”, hint at an underlying reluctance to discuss female genitalia – a reluctance which does not present itself in teenagers doodling dicks on notebooks. Of course, it’s fantastic that BuzzFeed are producing such videos, but when they do they are a novelty and have a certain shock factor. The narrative is still that we struggle to talk about our vaginas because they are awkward and weird and occasionally secrete blood and resemble dried fruit.

The answer to the question, “do you know what your vagina looks like?” is often a resounding “no”. But I think this issue of being acquainted with our own vaginas goes deeper (pun unintended, I promise) than their anatomical positioning, their drawability, and the limitations of language in describing them. The crux of it is that we’re not really taught about vaginas at all. I find myself questioning what my sex education was like at school. The answer: minimal. Frankly, shit. Incomprehensive and incomprehensible. I distinctly remember sex-ed involved a cartoon in which two tadpole-esque creatures intertwined themselves, created an indeterminately shaped mass of pixels on the screen, and had a baby one and a half minutes later, after a whistle-stop tour of a fallopian tube system which, to my disorientated eleven year-old brain, looked more like a sheep’s face than a uterus (a ewe-terus, if you will).

The more serious side of this is that, in light of substandard sex education, young people – children or preenagers – are more likely to turn to pornography to ‘educate’ themselves (I put ‘educate’ in inverted commas because this is not much of an education). It is thought that more than half of boys and nearly a third of girls see their first pornographic images before they turn 13. I don’t want to be a fearmongerer lamenting the state of ‘impressionable youths’, but it is frightening to think that a generation of young people might grow up believing that vaginas are naturally prepubescently hairless and surgically enhanced. That a generation of girls might grow up comparing their vaginas to the nip-tucked labia of professional pornstars. That a generation of boys might grow up seeing the vagina as a vessel for a phallus rather than the doorway through which they entered the world.

Which is why I say to those of us who have been denied a comprehensive education in sex, which stretches beyond the ins-and-outs, the birds-and-the-bees: it’s time to embrace the vagina. To take the vagina into our own hands. You don’t have to channel Carolee Schneemann and slowly extract a paper scroll from your vagina à la ‘Interior Scroll’. You don’t even have to go down the figurative Georgia O’Keeffe route and paint a vagina flowering like the centre of an iris. Only do not neglect it in its shadowy depths. Accept it for all its ingrown hairs and wobbly bits. Excuse me while I limber up, find the nearest mirror, strip off my underwear, and have a gander. After all, you should know your body better than anybody else does.