Just hours after dropping his eagerly anticipated fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, Harry Styles made a triumphant return to the stage on 6 March for a special one-off gig at Manchester’s Co-Op Live arena.That performance was documented by Netflix for a new concert film – Harry Styles. One Night In Manchester. – that showcases the synth-heavy dance-pop sound of Styles’ latest project, a creative direction inspired by the high-voltage live shows of LCD Soundsystem and the propulsive electronica of artists like Jamie xx and Ben Klock.Styles’ electronic influences are on full display in the Netflix special: within seconds of striding on stage, he’s twiddling away at the kind of rig you might expect to see at a Floating Points set, not a sold-out arena show from a chart-topping heartthrob.It’s a decent setup, comprised of a Roland SP-404 MKII sampler, Roland RE-201 Space Echo tape delay unit and a desktop edition of the Sequential Prophet-6 analogue synth, but the most surprising piece of kit in Styles’ personal rig is a modular synth – not something you expect to see in the hands of the UK’s biggest popstar, it’s fair to say.
