Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Is Harry Styles really the new David Bowie?

Styles' music is the least interesting thing about him

Harry Styles (Credit: Getty images)

There’s something ludicrous about old people trying to understand the pop music preferred by youth. Mind you, youth is relative and here I am at the age of 62, explaining Harry Styles.

Styles isn’t just a pop star, he’s a phenomenon and therefore worthy of examination by ancient people like me. Last week, Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today featured him alongside Ukraine and ‘partygate’, asking: ‘Does Harry Styles ever put a foot wrong?’

Having just played his first London gig in four years, where nearly 5,000 teenage girls sang every word to his latest album, this month he will play Wembley Stadium, entertaining 140,000 people over two nights. The album in question, Harry’s House, became the most streamed album by a male artist on its first day of release ever.

So what’s the secret of the 28-year-old who grew up above a Worcestershire pub before leaving school at 16 to work in a bakery, and whose career started when his manufactured boy band came third in the 2010 series of TV talent show The X Factor?

For a start, he’s not Ed Sheeran, the most successful pop star of our times, whose voice is best described as pasteurised ‘urban’ delivered with an insistent, hollow enthusiasm. Still only 31, the ginger whinger minger has sold more than 150 million records worldwide, been named ‘Artist of the Decade’ and conducted the highest-grossing world tour of all time.

As befits a dullard, Sheeran signed, along with numerous other pop stars, a letter drafted by bitter multi-millionaire Bob Geldof warning against a ‘botched Brexit’; this loss to the Brains Trust also described himself as a fan of Jeremy Corbyn. The child of an arts curator and a jewellery designer, he is yet another example of the privately-educated artists colonising rock and pop music, previously the most likely escape route for ambitious proletarian youth.

Styles’ current single As It Was is better than the early ones, but it still basically just sounds like someone growling at a mobile phone ringtone

To put the nauseating cherry on the gluten-free artisan cake, Sheeran recently released an ode to his new baby, dribbling on thus: 

‘Welcome to the world/Through all the pain, you’re a diamond in the dirt/Don’t let them change you, words are only words/I stand beside you, for better or for worse/And I will find you whenever you’re lost/I’ll be right here.

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