The biggest pop album of the year came out on Friday and its cover art says a lot about stars in 2017. It doesn’t feature the artist’s beautiful face, but his water-drizzled bare back, his silver neck chains and tattoos, hinting at edginess. Inside, Harry Styles closes his eyes, up to his neck in deep water, around names of songs that play like homages to Nilsson, Gerry Rafferty and David Bowie. It’s as if he’s desperately, ritualistically, trying to wash away the manufactured star he once was, so he can be taken seriously at last.
This isn’t an approach you’d expect from a 23-year-old whose career was fine-tuned on The X Factor, who became part of one of the biggest boy bands of all time, One Direction, at 16. That band’s continuing success has been global and gargantuan: they were the first band in US chart history to have their first four albums debut at No 1; their 2014 tour, Where We Are, was one of the highest-grossing ever ($290m); they were the second wealthiest celebrities in the world on Forbes’ 2016 rich list.
But the fashion for pop stars these days isn’t to shout about fame, but to display raw, naked honesty. This is the quality that got one-time One Direction songwriter Ed Sheeran 16 chart places in the Top 20 when he released his recent record-breaking album, ÷ (Divide), and it was also the first thing mentioned by Styles in a gushing Rolling Stone profile last month. “The number one thing was I wanted to be honest,” he told veteran journalist and Almost Famous screenwriter Cameron Crowe. “I hadn’t done that before.”
Retro, hipsterish imagery that doesn’t focus on stardom also helps this impression of authenticity. So perhaps this isn’t a peculiar move for Styles after all. Perhaps it’s the canniest one, in a career marked by canniness from day one. He was born in Redditch, Worcestershire, in 1994, and brought up in Cheshire village Holmes Chapel. On his first appearance on The X Factor in September 2010, he described it as “quite boring, nothing much happens there”. Then he affected an ironic smile, something his fans would later learn to scream at: “It’s quite… picturesque.”
His mother and stepfather were at his first audition too, wearing T-shirts bearing his name (his parents divorced when he was seven, but he remains close to his father). Back then, Styles sang with a local band, White Eskimo, who had won a battle of the bands competition; he was working at a bakery for pocket money before doing his A-levels. Compared with other wannabes on the show, he looked oddly raffish from the off, a long, looped scarf and long cardigan his pop star garb of choice, his hair all regency curls rather than gravity-defying gel.
His intentions were nevertheless clear: “Singing’s what I want to do. If the people that can make that happen for me don’t think I should be doing that, then it’s a major setback in my plans.” On stage, in front of future record label boss, Simon Cowell, Styles showed his steel. “I’ve always wanted to audition,” he said, “but I’ve always been so young.”
From the moment Styles sang Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely, again, an unusual choice, but a classic song regardless, his star quality was obvious. He looked like a softer version of Dexter Fletcher in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio; he had a strong pop voice that could probably come alive with moulding and training. Nevertheless, he was eliminated from The X Factor’s solo singer rounds, before being pulled back and put together with four other recent rejects to form a pop group, a masterful move on the part of the show.
It meant that One Direction’s fans were rooting for them from the very start of their story, at a time when social networks such as Twitter were bringing them together, as well as radically altering the rules of engagement between pop star and fan. In other words, here was the first big boy band of the social media age. It’s no surprise that 2010 remains The X Factor’s most watched season to date.
One Direction didn’t win – they came third – but this didn’t matter. The ball was already rolling, as were their canny backroom team. They ignored the usual career trajectory of reality acts (huge Christmas No 1, progressively minor chart hits and a slow sag into oblivion) and, instead, followed the path of the last huge reality band, Girls Aloud, who acknowledged both pop’s past and present in their sound and style.
One Direction’s debut single, What Makes You Beautiful, for example, mimicked the riff from Grease’s Summer Nights, giving the boys’ first outing playfulness and timelessness straightaway (and it worked: it went straight to No 1). Their second album’s lead single, Live While We’re Young, repeated this trick, paying considerable homage to the Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go?
In an age where young people’s music consumption wasn’t just about new releases, where pop history was a few clicks away on YouTube or Spotify, this chimed. So did the boys’ love of humour in their videos. Kiss You, from 2013, saw them spoofing Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys, while they played ridiculous parodies of record company executives in the same year’s Best Song Ever. Styles was a particularly funny, tank top-wearing fan of choreography. His first acting role proper suggests a move more reminiscent of Mick Jagger or David Bowie’s forays into film: he’s in Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Second World War epic, Dunkirk.
Styles stood out from One Direction for other reasons, too. There were his androgynous fashion choices, for starters: his long-haired, pussy-bow blouse phase was more Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World than primped and glossed boy band drone. His high-profile love life also saw him becoming bigger than his band. In 2011, he dated The X Factor host Caroline Flack, who is 14 years his senior. A year later came a fling with Taylor Swift, who wrote several songs for her global smash album, 1989, allegedly inspired by him; a relationship with Kim Kardashian’s supermodel half-sister, Kendall Jenner, followed. Styles admitted to Cameron Crowe that these exes inspired lyrics on his debut album. Leaving his fans to debate which are and which aren’t is surely part of the marketing campaign.
So is the rebranding of Styles as an older, sensitive, complicated guy and, more than that, a musician. When his debut single, Sign of the Times, was released in April, many critics were pleasantly surprised. Yes, the title was a terribly self-conscious nod to Prince and the Space Oddity sound effect in its opening was somewhat overegged, but the song was also disarming and different and sombre and lovely – and his voice sounded great.
The rest of Styles’s debut album holds similarly encouraging turns, although he should have gone with his gut instinct on giving it its original title, Pink, an altogether more intriguing title than the dull, eponymous option Columbia Records plumped for. Still, Meet Me in the Hallway would be praised even more widely if it were by Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes. Woman suggests Hall and Oates meeting Elton John in a bar, woozily and wonderfully. Yes, Only Angel flies a little too close to late 60s Rolling Stones and Carolina even closer to Stealers Wheel’s Stuck in the Middle With You, but this isn’t a new fault in Styles’s career once you start to look back.
When the balance has less history and more Styles in it, there is some magic, which is not a bad state of affairs, especially when you began your career as the plaything of the man who launched the career of Robson and Jerome. Better still, Styles is happy to celebrate the young women who have supported his career from the start – as he did loudly to Crowe when asked if he was worried about proving his credibility to older, cooler people.
“Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music… have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say,” he said. Styles has known his audience from day one, when he had already wanted to be a pop star for years. “You gonna tell me they’re not serious? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. Teenage girl fans – they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there.”
You get the sense Harry Styles hopes, yearns and prays to always be there.
THE STYLES FILE
Born Harry Edward Styles, 1 February 1994, in Redditch, Worcestershire, and raised in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire. His father worked in finance and was a fan of the Stones, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd. His parents divorced when he was seven and Harry lived with his mother, who suggested that he try out for The X Factor.
Best of times
Cracking America. In 2014, One Direction became the first band in the US Billboard 200 history to have their first four albums debut at No 1.
Worst of times
In August 2015, One Direction announced they would be taking a hiatus from March 2016. Zayn Malik had left the band a few months earlier. Directioners, the band’s loyal fanbase, were traumatised.
What he says
“I always said, at the very beginning, all I wanted was to be the grandad with the best stories... and the best shelf of artefacts and bits and trinkets.”
Rolling Stone interview, April 2017
What others say
“Too much money, too much success, too quickly. Simon [Cowell] created monsters and that was it. They all think they’re going to be solo stars. They’re not. Only Harry. That’s it.”
Louis Walsh
