Tutu good: how Harry Styles suddenly became Britain’s greatest export
The serious musician Harry Styles is the toast of the United States right now, having played both host and musical guest of Saturday Night Live (SNL) over the weekend. “With such a confident leap, it is easy to imagine him as part of a future musical bro-fecta with Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon,” wrote Vulture. He can sing. He can act. He can make fun of himself. He has, as he says, “fantastic hair” and, at 25, is now old enough to comfortably appreciate as eye candy. Appearing only weeks after Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who would have put money on Harry Styles to be the Brit to save SNL?
Well, I would have. As a former Directioner, now on “indefinite hiatus” with the band, Styles’s star power has been evident. I saw them perform live in early 2015, mere weeks before Zayn left. The tension on stage seemed clear to me in the audience, but Styles was so effortlessly charismatic as to emerge a frontman in a group seemingly determined to deny the existence of one.
Of the five young men, he was clearly the most at ease in the role of rock star, perfectly pitching his between song banter to win over the swooning teenage girls, their chaperones, and the twentysomething journalists still working out to what extent their fandom was ironic. Though the show was certainly unpolished compared with the other big stadium pop acts I have seen – it looked as if Styles might have been chewing gum throughout – he was the one who looked as if he was actually enjoying himself. When he jokes in the SNL monologue about One Direction being grown in test tubes, it is clear that Simon Cowell had to give some of the members more fish food than others.
In making a star, there is only so much you can fake. The director Christopher Nolan said he cast Styles in Dunkirk unaware of the scale of his fame with 1D, and “because he fit the part wonderfully and truly earned a seat at the table”. Even in his modelling for Gucci at a St Albans chippy, and his competent Live Lounge cover of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain, there is an evident line through all of Styles’s ventures that makes him cohesive, likeable and bankable.
Watermelon Sugar and Lights Up – the first singles from his upcoming second album Fine Lines – are both very radio-friendly, but with brass and percussive elements that suggest yet another new sound for Styles. A few months ago he was in Rolling Stone talking winningly about doing magic mushrooms in Malibu, listening to Paul McCartney and biting off the end of his tongue – a true story, no doubt, but also a smart move when this sort of cheekychappy, British-eccentric brand plays even better in the US than at home. One Direction casts a long shadow in the UK, and Styles has not quite yet shaken off his image as a Fisher-Price frontman, but he makes perfect sense for what an American market understands by “British psychedelic rock”. PWB may have the Amazon deal, but Styles might yet just prove Britain’s most lucrative export.