Pagination links missing for first link (1) and previous button? How to get pagination links to work?

I'm trying to add pagination to my WordPress query using pagination_links() however I am getting no links returned for my page 1 links and previous link? Other links are adding the paged query string to the URL which then redirect you to /page/3/ for example. Unsure whether I need to update the query below to add these URL's instead of the query string?

Can anyone see what is wrong with the below and how I can get the pagination links to be correct?

Any advice and help would be appreciated.

Query Pagination:

$posts_per_page = get_option('posts_per_page');
$paged = ( get_query_var( 'paged' ) ) ? absint( get_query_var( 'paged' ) ) : 1;

$args = array(
    'posts_per_page' = $posts_per_page,
    'post_type' = 'post',
    'paged' = $paged,
);

$articles = new WP_Query( $args ); 

$args = array(
    'base'               = '%_%',
    'format'             = '?paged=%#%',
    'current'            = max( 1, get_query_var('paged') ),
    'total'              = $wp_query-max_num_pages,
    'show_all'           = false,
    'end_size'           = 1,
    'mid_size'           = 1,
    'prev_next'          = true,
    'prev_text'          = 'span class="icon icon-arrow-left" aria-hidden="true"/spanspan class="sr-only"Previous/span',
    'next_text'          = 'span class="icon icon-arrow-right" aria-hidden="true"/spanspan class="sr-only"Next/span',
    'type'               = 'plain',
    'add_args'           = false,
    'add_fragment'       = '',
    'before_page_number' = '',
    'after_page_number'  = ''
);

echo paginate_links( $args );

Returned HTML:

div class="pagination"
    a class="prev page-numbers" href=""span class="icon icon-arrow-left" aria-hidden="true"/spanspan class="sr-only"Previous/span/a
    a class="page-numbers" href=""1/a
    span aria-current="page" class="page-numbers current"2/span
    a class="page-numbers" href="?paged=3"3/a
    a class="next page-numbers" href="?paged=3"span class="icon icon-arrow-right" aria-hidden="true"/spanspan class="sr-only"Next/span/a            
/div