Even Pharrell Williams’s wordless moments, it turns out, have the distinctiveness and variety of his music. Some are accompanied by exaggerated, widened eyes and expressive gesticulations that set the brightly coloured beads on his wrists audibly rattling; others are vast stretches of silence where jet-lag and a desire for specificity conspire to keep a crucial word just out of his grasp, and those delicate, immaculately preserved features freeze like a buffering video.
But, at the point that we are discussing his current place in the musical landscape, an answer comes without hesitation. ‘Well, I’m not some huge pop star,’ he says, soft-spoken and sincere. ‘I’m a producer and a musician.’ Now it is my turn to pause and laugh, a little nervously, because I assume that he must be joking. Because, really? The man who, via songs with Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and a bajillion others, turned The Neptunes into arguably one of the most era-defining and influential production teams of all time; the twice Oscar-nominated, 13-time Grammy winner behind the multiplatinum-selling, shimmeringly perfect Daft Punk collaboration, ‘Get Lucky’, and the mononymously known, gnomic street-style pioneer whose honeyed vocals — whether firing up a student dance floor on ‘Drop it Like it’s Hot’ or appeasing shrieking four-year olds with ‘Happy’ — can justifiably be said to have at least partly soundtracked the lives of multiple overlapping generations. This is the man who doesn’t think he’s a wholly original, inarguably enormous pop megastar?
