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bum is not ’t sing. ng as o you can feel the music pouring out of him. It is breathtaking.
His manager, who’s been with him since he was a teenager, tells me she still loves to quietly watch Harry disappear at the keyboard, lost again in his private rapture.
In public, Harry just as passionately defends art in all forms as funding is relentlessly cut.
“There are no statistics to art,” he says. “It’s not a football score. It’s hard to articulate to people who are not wired that way but it’s about humanity. Art takes over where words fail. It unites us but it has always co-existed next to the most difficult and troubling parts of life.
“When people try and clean up parts of society they see as ugly, imperfect or different, you lose something.
“A journalist asked me if it bothered me that Porter was writing songs about men and I was like, ‘First, why would it? Second, we are talking about one of the great composers of all time. How offensive to assume everything he wrote was from personal experience?’
“If I could only write autobiographically I’d have a very narrow perspective.the whole point is to fantasise, explore different lives. I often imagine different versions of myself, with a different life, sexuality, faith.that’s what artists do.”
Harry even famously embraced playing the horrifying serial killer who terrorised Sigourneyweaver in Copycat.
“We all think terrible thoughts. I found it amazing to access and visit that part of me although it creeped Jill out at the time. She was like, ‘I’ll sleep in a different bed for now’. Sigourney wouldn’t speak to me as myself until the premiere.”
As the #Metoo movement exposes generations of all-too-real horrors against women, does he fear for his daughters?
“They are strong women.there has been an epidemic of women being treated as prey and it’s important this dialogue has started, but I don’t worry about them looking after themselves. I remind them that not everything needs to be public.these days, with social media you can say or do something foolish and your life and career are over.”
PORTER, of course, was writing in the 1930s, a phenomenally liberal time across Europe and America. It was swiftly followed by Nazism in Germany and later Mccarthyism in Hollywood as any sense of “other” was persecuted.
With societies across the globe painfully divided once more, does hope still float for Harry?
“I’m not impervious to sadness or tragedy. I’m highly flawed. I’m insecure. My faith is complicated. But I’m always hopeful, maybe too much. I like the way it feels.
“It sounds nuts, but I still feel like I’m 18. I feel likewillywonka. Live, love and dream. Anything is possible.”
Perhaps, all it needs is more men like Harry.
● True Love: A Celebration Of Cole Porter is out on October 25