Harry Styles evokes Hockney for stadium art with a human centre
Britain’s reigning pop superstar begins 12-concert Wembley run, skipping and smiling through an arty show of supreme heart
He shoots, he scores. Harry Styles’s first night at Wembley Stadium felt like an easy yet glorious win. Britain’s reigning pop superstar noted that it was in the smaller arena venue “next door” that his journey started “when my sister brought me to London to audition for X-Factor and I joined a band”. Yet everything about this arty, modern, heartfelt and expansive show suggests Styles’s boyband stint with One Direction has been left far behind.
After 10 nights in Amsterdam, Friday’s show kicked off a record-breaking 12-concert run at Wembley, surpassing recent residencies by Coldplay (10 shows at Wembley last year) and Oasis (seven). World tours used to involve entertainers circulating the globe, now stars set up camp and let audiences come to them. Perhaps this contributed to the oddly relaxed air about such a blockbuster homecoming. Eighty thousand fans screamed and sang and danced energetically along with their genial hero, yet the mood was warm and friendly rather than hyped up and hysterical, reflecting Styles’s distinctly mellow persona.
Superstardom seems to have come very easily to Styles, which is not to underestimate the work it takes to make mass entertainment appear so effortless. Styles chatted with relaxed charm and dashed about the huge space with boundless energy – waving, smiling, blowing kisses and pointing delightedly as if constantly spotting old friends in the crowd. The 33-year-old ran a marathon during a three-year break from touring, and the training has evidently paid dividends.
The set-up was impressively spectacular without resorting to the kind of special-effects overload routinely offered by most of his modern pop rivals. There was an almost daring absence of distractions for much of the show, with no pyrotechnics or pointless animatronics. Two dancers made a brief appearance, whilst Styles himself did not so much as change his two-tone open-neck shirt for the entire two hours, sweat blooming under the armpits.
There was a strong emphasis on the fraternity of musicianship and intimacy of audience interaction. Styles’s tight 11-piece band (occasionally augmented by an eight-piece string section) were prominently featured on big screens interacting warmly with their frontman, who dipped in and out of arrangements to play guitar and keyboards when he wasn’t skipping about a vast set of intersecting runways covering the whole of the Wembley pitch.
His set drew on four solo albums that have covered quite a lot of musical ground, from harmonic songcraft to Princey funk and fizzy synth pop, before landing on the scruffy, arty indie electro confection of this year’s offbeat album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.
That was widely deemed to have been a commercial misfire (its singles came and went without leaving much of an impression), yet it would be hard to conceive of a star and audience less bothered by the opinions of his critics, especially when the whole stadium joined in a massive singalong of the refrain from Aperture: “We belong together.”
A quote from the late David Hockney flashed on screen, about art bringing people closer, and this was a show that might have been designed to prove the great artist’s point. Styles has concocted a stadium-scale display with a very human centre that affirms the grown-up pin-up’s status as a fine original pop artist in his own right. He’s always had style now he’s proved he has substance too.
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
