A few weeks back, Harry Styles announced his US tour dates. They offered the kind of itinerary one can only boggle at: multiple shows in huge venues, including a staggering 10 nights at Madison Square Garden. It’s not merely that Styles has leapfrogged his fellow former One Direction members in terms of popularity, although he clearly has: spare a thought for little Niall Horan peddling his mum-friendly MOR, Louis Tomlinson’s tepid indie rock and, indeed, the lascivious pop-R&B of Liam Payne and Zayn Malik, who called his last album Nobody Is Listening, a title that eerily predicted its commercial response. It’s that he seems to have pulled off one of the hardest tricks in pop – the transition from manufactured scream-inducing teen idol to more mature artist – more effectively than anyone since Justin Timberlake, attracting none of the snarky sniffiness that attached itself to even his most noted forebears.
Months before its release, there were people online earnestly unpicking the links between his forthcoming third album Harry’s House and the work of Joni Mitchell. At the end of March, the actual Joni Mitchell – not, in any account, one of rock history’s big suck ups – joined in. This didn’t happen when Robbie Williams released Sing When You’re Winning. The first single from Harry’s House, As It Was, was garlanded with hosannahs despite the fact that, to a layperson at least, it didn’t seem that different a deal from Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits. A little breezier, perhaps, a little more indebted to the sound of American alt-rock, but both offered sagas of lovelorn hedonism and music audibly modelled on 80s pop by way of the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights: while Sheeran borrowed from Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy, Styles, like the Weeknd, borrowed from a-ha’s Take on Me. Suffice to say that Bad Habits was critically dismissed as lazy thievery from a man cravenly obsessed with commercial success; As It Was was greeted like the second coming: “a natural move to a more meta and self-referential style of storytelling”, “a fearless leap into a new era”.
