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UCCI.60 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
always on the run, he finally gets to take his time
and embrace the insanity of it all. “We were here for
six weeks in Malibu, without going into the city,” he
says. “People would bring their dogs and kids. We’d
take a break to play cornhole tournaments. Family
values!” But it’s also the place where he has proudly
bled for his art. “Mushrooms and Blood. Now there’s
an album title.”
Some of the engineers come over to catch up on
gossip. Harry gestures out the window to the Pacific
waves, where the occasional nude revelry might have
happened, and where the occasional pair of pants got
lost. “There was one night where we’d been party ing
a bit and ended up going down to the beach and I lost
all my stuff, basically,” he says. “I lost all my clothes.
I lost my wallet. Maybe a month later, somebody
found my wallet and mailed it back, anonymously. I
guess it just popped out of the sand. But what’s sad
is, I lost my favorite mustard corduroy flares.” A mo-
ment of silence is held for the corduroy flares.
Recording in the studio today is Brockhampton,
the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest boy band.”
Harry says hi to all the Brockhampton guys, which
takes a while since there seem to be a few dozen of
them. “We’re together all the time,” one tells Harry
out in the yard. “We see each other all day, every
day.” He pauses. “You know how it is.”
Harry breaks into a dry grin. “Yes, I know how
it is.”
One Direction made three of this century’s biggest
and best pop albums in a rush — Midnight Memories,
Four and Made in the A.M. Yet they cut those rec ords
on tour, ducking into the nearest studio when they
had a day off. 1D were a unique mix of five differ-
ent musical personalities: Harry, Niall Horan, Louis
Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, and Liam Payne. But the
pace took its toll. Malik quit in the middle of a tour,
immediately after a show in Hong Kong. The band
announced its hiatus in August 2015.
It’s traditional for boy-band singers, as they go
solo and grow up, to renounce their pop past. Every-
body remembers George Michael setting his leather
jacket on fire, or Sting quitting the Police to make jazz
records. This isn’t really Harry Styles’ mentality. “I
know it’s the thing that always happens. When some-
body gets out of a band, they go, ‘That wasn’t me. I
was held back.’ But it was me. And I don’t feel like I
was held back at all. It was so much fun. If I didn’t
enjoy it, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s not like I was
tied to a radiator.”
Whenever Harry mentions One Direction — never
by name, always “the band” or “the band I was in”
— he uses the past tense. It is my unpleasant duty to
ask: Does he see 1D as over? “I don’t know,” he says.
“I don’t think I’d ever say I’d never do it again, be-
cause I don’t feel that way. If there’s a time when we
all really want to do it, that’s the only time for us to
do it, because I don’t think it should be about any-
thing else other than the fact that we’re all like, ‘Hey,
this was really fun. We should do this again.’ But
until that time, I feel like I’m really enjoying making
music and experimenting. I enjoy making music this
way too much to see myself doing a full switch, to
go back and do that again. Because I also think if we
went back to doing things the same way, it wouldn’t
be the same, anyway.”
When the band stopped, did he take those friend-
ships with him? “Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Defi-
nitely. Because above all else, we’re the people who
went through that. We’re always going to have that,
even if we’re not the closest. And the fact is, just be-
cause you’re in a band with someone doesn’t mean
you have to be best friends. That’s not always how
it works. Just because Fleetwood Mac fight, that
doesn’t mean they’re not amazing. I think even in
the disagreements, there’s always a mutual respect
for each other — we did this really cool thing togeth-
er, and we’ll always have that. It’s too important to
me to ever be like, ‘Oh, that’s done.’ But if it happens
it will happen for the right reasons.”I
F THE INTENSITY of the Harry fandom ever
seems mysterious to you, there’s a live clip
you might want to investigate, from the sum-
mer of 2018. Just search the phrase “Tina,
she’s gay.” In San Jose, on one of the final
nights of his tour, Harry spots a fan with a home-
made sign: “I’m Gonna Come Out to My Parents
Because of You!” He asks the fan her name (she says
it’s Grace) and her mother’s name (Tina). He asks
the audience for silence because he has an import-
ant announcement to make: “Tina! She’s gaaaaay!”
Then he has the entire crowd say it together. Thou-
sands of strangers start yelling “Tina, she’s gay,” and
every one of them clearly means it — it’s a heavy mo-
ment, definitely not a sound you forget after you
hear it. Then Harry sings “What Makes You Beauti-
ful.” (Of course, the way things work now, the clip
went viral within minutes. So did Grace’s photo of
Tina giving a loving thumbs-up to her now-out teen-
age daughter. Grace and Tina attended Harry’s next
show together.)
Harry likes to cultivate an aura of sexual ambigui-
ty, as overt as the pink polish on his nails. He’s dated
women throughout his life as a public figure, yet he
has consistently refused to put any kind of label on
his sexuality. On his first solo tour, he frequently
waved the pride, bi, and trans flags, along with the
Black Lives Matter flag. In Philly, he waved a rainbow
flag he borrowed from a fan up front: “Make AmericaGay Again.” One of the live fan favorites: “Medicine,”
a guitar jam that sounds a bit like the Grateful Dead
circa Europe ’72, but has a flamboyantly pansexual
hook: “The boys and girls are in/I mess around with
them/And I’m OK with it.”
He’s always had a flair for flourishes like this, since
the 1D days. An iconic clip from November 2014:
Harry and Liam are on a U.K. chat show. The host
asks the oldest boy-band fan-bait question in the
book: What do they look for in a date? “Female,”
Liam quips. “That’s a good trait.” Harry shrugs. “Not
that important.” Liam is taken aback. The host is
in shock. On tour in the U.S. that year, he wore a
Michael Sam football jersey, in support of the first
openly gay player drafted by an NFL team. He’s
blown up previously unknown queer artists like King
Princess and Muna.
What do those flags onstage mean to him? “I want
to make people feel comfortable being whatever
they want to be,” he says. “Maybe at a show you can
have a moment of knowing that you’re not alone.
I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through
the same things as a lot of the people that come to
the shows. I can’t claim that I know what it’s like, be-
cause I don’t. So I’m not trying to say, ‘I understand
what it’s like.’ I’m just trying to make people feel in-
cluded and seen.”
On tour, he had an END GUN VIOLENCE sticker on
his guitar; he added a BLACK LIVES MATTER sticker,
as well as the flag. “It’s not about me trying to cham-
pion the cause, because I’m not the person to do
that,” he says. “It’s just about not ignoring it, I guess.
I was a little nervous to do that because the last thing
I wanted was for it to feel like I was saying, ‘Look at
me! I’m the good guy!’ I didn’t want anyone who was
really involved in the movement to think, ‘What the
fuck do you know?’ But then when I did it, I realized
people got it. Everyone in that room is on the same
page and everyone knows what I stand for. I’m not
saying I understand how it feels. I’m just trying to
say, ‘I see you.’ ”‘M
AN CANNOT LIVE by coffee alone,”
Harry says. “But he will give it a
damn good try.” He sips his iced
Americano — not his first today,
or his last. He’s back behind the
wheel, on a mission to yet another studio — but this
time for actual work. Today it’s string overdubs.
Harry is dressed in Gucci from head to toe, except
for one item of clothing: a ratty Seventies rock T-shirt
he proudly scavenged from a vintage shop. It says
COMMANDER QUAALUDE.
On the drive over, he puts on the jazz pianist Bill
Evans — “Peace Piece,” from 1959, which is the wake-
up tone on his phone. He just got into jazz during a
long sojourn in Japan. He likes to find places to hide
out and be anonymous: For his first album, he de-
camped to Jamaica. Over the past year, he spent
months roaming Japan.
In February, he spent his 25th birthday sitting by
himself in a Tokyo cafe, reading Haruki Murakami’s
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. “I love Murakami,” he
says. “He’s one of my favorites. Reading didn’t really
used to be my thing. I had such a short attention
span. But I was dating someone who gave me some
books; I felt like I had to read them because she’d
think I was a dummy if I didn’t read them.”HARRY STYLES
“W hen someone
gets out of a [boy]
band, they go,
‘That wasn’t me,’ ”
he says. “But it was
me. And I don’t feel
like I was held back
at all. If I didn’t
enjoy it, I wouldn’t
have done it. It’s
not like I was tied
to a radiator.”