By 
God knows I’ve tried to resist Harry Styles, the dinky boyband poppet turned globe-frotting classic rock pasticheur. Not that I haven’t admired the hair. We can all agree on the hair. It’s so gorgeous, and glossy, and just… yum. And the ‘fits. Gotta love the ‘fits. Not since, ooh, Jagger-Bowie-Prince-insert-name-of-preferred-gender-bending-pop-ledge has anyone had so much fun with a pot of neon nail polish, a feather boa and a small girl’s blouse. The sexy, but not too sexy, videos; the toothsome chat show appearances; the commanding red carpet sashays: anyone can see the guy is a pro. No wonder he has so totally eclipsed his former bandmates in One Direction, none of whose names anyone can remember. Nick? Simon? Ronan? Jason? Abs? Ginger? Am I getting warmer?
Harry Styles is the pop star of the moment, and there’s no point arguing with it. If the overall effect is less lock-up-your-daughters than take-him-home-to-mum, then perhaps that’s what makes Styles the perfect chart-topper for 2022. He’s charming, he’s clean cut, he has beautiful manners (and great hair!) and he’s as woke as you like.
This is, indisputably, not the moment for a white cisgender pop god manque to project the old rock’n’roll values of edge, danger, sexual voraciousness, questionable lifestyle choices. And Harry doesn’t. He does cute, he does soft, he does sugary, he does palatable. He’s an Aperol Spritz, just the one, in the guise of a long line of coke.
The tunes? Easy to hum along to, difficult to tell apart. “Watermelon Sugar”, that’s the only one I could have named until last week, when he released his third solo album, Harry’s House, an instant international megahit, and indisputably the sound of the summer. The whole world might be going to hell, but at least we’ve got Harry, to wrap us in his warm embrace and then cook us a macrobiotic breakfast in the morning while asking tenderly after our mental health. “Late Night Talking” is the title of one of the new songs. Late night talking? I mean, jeez, how very sweet.
Like so many of us, Styles is in thrall to the soothing sounds and foppish styles of singer-songwritin’ Seventies Los Angeles, especially imperial phase Fleetwood Mac. Also yacht rock earworms, of the Steely Dan, 10CC variety. On Harry’s House, you can hear all of that, plus less feted outfits of my own youth. Johnny Hates Jazz came to mind, possibly for the first time since 1987.
Obliging to a fault, Styles has done the critics’ work for them: the first track on Harry’s House is called “Music For a Sushi Restaurant”, which very nicely sums up his brand of pleasantly non-confrontational background noodling. He got it in there first, even though “getting it in there first” is the last thing you could typically say about Harry Styles, so determinedly retro is his approach.
He has impeccable taste, then, in threads, in stylists, in girlfriends. If you went to Harry’s actual house, in Laurel Canyon of course, no doubt you’d find Nilsson Schmilsson playing on the vintage turntable and original Barney Bubbles on the wall and a wardrobe full of Nudie suits like those Gram Parsons used to wear, and a glass of cloudy orange wine waiting for you on the deck, where Olivia Wilde is just finishing up a yoga class.
What does it all add up to? Not much, and, in the contemporary fashion-speak, everything. Harry’s House breaks absolutely no new ground in any shape or form. It’s a warm bath to wash your cares away, with candles and a chamomile tea. And who’d say “no” to that right now?
Incidentally, but perhaps instructively, I have my own brief Harry Styles encounter to share. A couple of years ago, pre-pandemic, I attended a fabulous party in Rome, at an ancient museum on a hill, held by Gucci. There was a dazzling catwalk show and then endless champagne in a beautiful garden and at some point, rumours began to circulate of a secret late-night performance by no less than Stevie Nicks. The hour grew late and the crowd began to thin but a few of us dipsomaniacal hopefuls stayed on, FOMO trumping hopes of a few hours’ kip before the early flight home. And then, sure enough, for an audience of not more than 200, Fleetwood Mac’s original witchy gypsy fire woman and her band — Waddy Wachtel on guitar! — took to a tiny stage and began to play the hits: “Rhiannon”, “Gypsy”, “Edge of Seventeen”. “Oh, my God,” swooned my pal Jerry, hand on chest failing to still his beating heart as he slipped into fashion-French: “Je die!”
Stevie was everything you’d hope for: funny, delicate, mesmerising. And then Harry Styles, face of Gucci, shuffled to the side of the stage, and the band struck up the opening chords to the sublime “Landslide” and I thought, quite frankly, do us as favour, Styles. You may be a dandy heartbreaker of considerable starry charisma, but we are in the presence of classic rock royalty. Know your limitations.
Then he began to sing, in duet with Stevie, and the place went completely guano. The boy can really hold a note, and he has stadium-sized charisma, and suddenly it was possible to see what all the fuss is about. To a man, woman, and nongendered person, we were all utterly smitten. We climbed that mountain, and we turned around. And yes — how could it be otherwise? — the landslide brought us down.
Later still, in the wee small hours, a handful of us, including me, Jerry, and Harry Styles, piled into a people carrier. We were driven to a nightclub and ushered into a room where shirtless young men threw their well-muscled arms in the air to the insistent thumping of a heavy beat. The noise was deafening, but through a combination of shouting in ears and hand signals Jerry was able to establish that we would all like something, anything, to drink. He returned from the bar with pints of lager. So hot and sweaty was it on that dancefloor that, during an energetic moment of Diana Ross-induced bodyslamming, one of our number — not me or Jerry or Harry, m’lud — dropped his pint on the dancefloor. The glass shattered into pieces. Being the selfless, community-spirited people that we are, we liggers ignored this and carried on throwing shapes.
Not Harry. Unseen, I believe, by anyone but me, he picked up an empty glass from the bar and, in his magical, jewel-encrusted, flared Gucci suit, crouched down on the floor and painstakingly retrieved each piece of jagged-edged glass from under the heels of the revellers who continued to cavort around him, unaware that a handsome A-lister was kneeling at their dancing feet, trying to save them from a nasty cut.
It's a small thing, no doubt, the sort of behaviour any of us would like to think we’d exhibit under the circumstances. (Although I, for one, hadn’t bothered, preferring to keep my own, less heavily embellished suit stain-free and my fingers safe from being stepped on.) But it struck me as representative of the boy’s appeal. What a nice, thoughtful, well brought up young man, I thought. OK, so he’s no Lou Reed. But maybe that’s OK. Maybe Lou Reed’s not who we need right now.
The tit tattoos? They’re just a bonus.
