The most powerful moment on Fine Line— a raw confession of jealousy. His engineer Sammy Witte was playing an acoustic guitar riff that Styles overheard and loved. “That was the moment of saying, ‘Yeah, I want my songs to sound like that,’” he says. It ends with a female voice speaking French, while Harry jams on guitar. �

Adore You’ is the poppiest song on the album,” he says of the latest single. “This time I really felt so much less afraid to write fun pop songs. It had to do with the whole thing of being on tour and feeling accepted. I listen to stuff like Harry Nilsson and Paul Simon and Van Morrison, and I think, well, Van Morrison has ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ and Nilsson has ‘Coconut.’ Bowie has ‘Let’s Dance.’ The fun stuff is important.” “Lights Up”Pre-pandemic talks between Styles and the Darling team didn’t make it far; he was, after all, due on a global tour for most of 2020. Instead, Shia LaBeouf won the role, but by the end of that summer, Wilde had reportedly booted the actor for poor on-set behaviour.

What do those flags onstage mean to him? “I want to make people feel comfortable being whatever they want to be,” he says. “Maybe at a show you can have a moment of knowing that you’re not alone. I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows. I can’t claim that I know what it’s like, because I don’t. So I’m not trying to say, ‘I understand what it’s like.’ I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.” Fans noticed something different about the encore: Styles didn’t end with his usual closer, ‘Kiwi’; instead, he opted to finish the night with a second performance of his new single ‘As It Was’, his dance-through-the-tears pandemic reflection on isolation and change. When he played it, the crowd exploded in a way even Styles had never experienced. It left him a bit shaken. How am I going to be mysterious,” he asks, only half-joking, “when I’ve been this honest with you?” Styles didn’t get to play live again until last autumn, but something funny happened in the interim. While we were bound to our homes, Styles experienced his first number one hit in Fine Line’s ‘Watermelon Sugar’, a tune so sweet it may take a moment to realise he’s singing about cunnilingus. Less than a year later, he won his first Grammy for it.After quite a few hours of recording the string quartet, a bottle of Casamigos tequila is opened. Commander Quaalude pours the drinks, then decides what the song needs now is a gaggle of nonsingers bellowing the chorus. “Muppet vocals” is how he describes it. He drags everyone in sight to crowd around the mics. Between takes, he wanders over to the piano to play Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up.” One of the choir members, creative director Molly Hawkins, is the friend who gave him the Murakami novel. “I think every man should read Norwegian Wood,” she says. “Harry’s the only man I’ve given it to who actually read it.” Styles parked his mattress in the Winstons’ attic. “Two weeks later and he hadn’t bought his house yet,” continues Winston. “It wasn’t going through. Then he said, ‘I’m going to stay until Christmas, if you don’t mind.’ Then Christmas came, and …” 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.”

Darling and Policeman make their big premieres at prestigious film festivals in Venice and Toronto late this summer, but Styles isn’t sure his pivot to the silver screen will be permanent. “I don’t imagine I’d do a movie for a while,” he says. There are rumors about how many Marvel movies he’s signed on for and other franchises he might be secretly in talks to do. (In response to a rumor he’ll be starring in a future Star Wars series, he says, “That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I’d imagine…false.”)

Harry Styles on the Cover of Rolling Stone

Styles jauntily appears at the Late Late office. He’s clearly a regular visitor, and he and Winston have a brotherly shorthand. Your computer may be infected with malware or spyware that makes automated requests to our server and causes problems.