62 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
HAT^ ANDBLAZERBYMARGIEL
A^ COUTURE.A friend gave him Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.
“It was the first book, maybe ever, where all I wanted
to do all day was read this,” he says. “I had a very
Murakami birthday because I ended up staying in
Tokyo on my own. I had grilled fish and miso soup
for breakfast, then I went to this cafe. I sat and drank
tea and read for five hours.”
In the studio, he’s overseeing the string quartet.
He has the engineers play T. Rex’s “Cosmic Danc-
er” for them, to illustrate the vibe he’s going for. You
can see he enjoys being on this side of the glass, sit-
ting at the Neve board, giving his instructions to the
musicians. After a few run-throughs, he presses the
intercom button to say, “Yeah, it’s pretty T. Rex. Best
damn strings I ever heard.” He buzzes again to add,
“And you’re all wonderful people.”
He’s curated his own weird enclave of kindred
spirits to collaborate with, like producers Jeff Bhask-
er and Tyler Johnson. His guitarist Mitch Rowland
was working at an L.A. pizza shop when Harry met
him. One of his closest collaborators is also one of his
best friends: Tom Hull, a.k.a. Kid Harpoon, a long-
time cohort of Florence and the Machine. Hull is an
effusive Brit with a heart-on-sleeve personality. Harry
calls him “my emotional rock.” Hull calls him “Gary.”
Hull was the one who talked him into taking a
course on Transcendental Meditation at David
Lynch’s institute — beginning each day with 20 min-
utes of silence, which doesn’t always come natural-
ly to either of them. “He’s got this wise-beyond-his-
years timelessness about him,” Hull says. “That’s
why he went on a whole emotional exploration with
these songs.” He’s 12 years older, with a wife and kids
in Scotland, and talks about Harry like an irreverent
but doting big brother.
Last year, Harry was in the gossip columns dating
the French model Camille Rowe; they split up last
summer after a year together. “He went through this
breakup that had a big impact on him,” Hull says. “I
turned up on Day One in the studio, and I had these
really nice slippers on. His ex-girlfriend that he was
really cut up about, she gave them to me as a present
— she bought slippers for my whole family. We’re still
close friends with her. I thought, ‘I like these slippers.
Can I wear them — is that weird?’
“So I turn up at Shangri-La the first day and literal-
ly within the first half-hour, he looks at me and says,
‘Where’d you get those slippers? They’re nice.’ I had
to say, ‘Oh, um, your ex-girlfriend got them for me.’
He said, ‘Whaaaat? How could you wear those?’ He
had a whole emotional journey about her, this whole
relationship. But I kept saying, ‘The best way of deal-
ing with it is to put it in these songs you’re writing.’ ”
True to his code of gallant discretion, Harry
doesn’t say her name at any point. But he admits the
songs are coming from personal heartbreak. “It’s not
like I’ve ever sat and done an interview and said, ‘So I
was in a relationship, and this is what happened,’ ” he
says. “Because, for me, music is where I let that cross
over. It’s the only place, strangely, where it feels right
to let that cross over.”
The new songs are certainly charged with pain.
“The stars didn’t align for them to be a forever thing,”
Hull says. “But I told him that famous Iggy Pop quote
where he says, ‘I only ever date women who are
going to fuck me up, because that’s where the songs
are.’ I said, ‘You’re 24, 25 years old, you’re in the
eligible-bachelor category. Just date amazing women,
versation is full of references to Big Star or Guided by
Voices or the Nils Lofgren guitar solo in Neil Young’s
“Speakin’ Out.” This is a band full of shameless rock
geeks, untainted by industry professionalism.
In the studio, while making the album, Harry
kept watching a vintage Bowie clip on his phone — a
late-Nineties TV interview I’d never seen. As he plays
it for me, he recites along — he’s got the rap mem-
orized. “Never play to the gallery,” Bowie advises.
“Never work for other people in what you do.” For
Harry, this was an inspiring pep talk — a reminderor men, or whatever, who are going to fuck you up,
and explore and have an adventure and let it affect
you and write songs about it.’ ”
His band is full of indie rockers who’ve gotten
swept up in Hurricane Harry. Before becoming his
iconic drum goddess, Sarah Jones played in New
Young Pony Club, a London band fondly remem-
bered by a few dozen of us. Rowland and Jones bare-
ly knew anything about One Direction before they
met Harry — the first time they heard “Story of My
Life” was when he asked them to play it. Their con-HARRY STYLES