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thisisheavynews · 5 years

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The Big Read – Sheer Mag “So much rock music is so bad and meaningless”

Five years in the past, Sheer Mag had been the buzziest DIY band on the planet. Now, they’re a full-throttle unbiased rock ‘n’ roll machine who sort out home abuse, prejudice, loss of life and anxiousness on ferocious new album ‘A Distant Call’. Singer Tina Halladay tells Ben Homewood why the world wants the Philadelphians…

On November threerd 2015, Sheer Mag began a seven-week European tour with a present at Bologna’s Freakout Club. Its title was an ideal match.

Back then, Sheer Mag had been the 12 months’s most hyped band, freaking individuals out with their buzzing, big-hearted rock‘n’roll, and exploding out of south Philadelphia’s DIY circuit. Accentuating the perfect bits of the basic rock they beloved and subverting its macho stereotypes, that they had an excellent, scratchy emblem and appeared like a bar band excavated from the 1970s. They lived, and recorded, in a spot referred to as The Nuthouse, its compact areas the right incubator for his or her greasy noise. They had launched two self-made four-track EPs, ‘I’ and ‘II’, and their songs gave the impression of they had been on fireplace. The likes of ‘What You Want’, ‘Point Breeze’ and ‘Fan The Flames’ had been white sizzling, insanely good. Sheer Mag had been unsigned and they weren’t doing interviews. Word was spreading, and tickets had been scarce.

“That first European tour was insane,” says the group’s singer Tina Halladay. “Our tour manager messaged me beforehand and said, ‘You will probably break up!’ I was like, ‘Yeah whatever, I guess we’ll see…’”

Photo: Angela Owens

Sheer Mag simply needed to play, so they flew to Europe, employed a van and proceeded to spend infinite hours inside it, freezing. Halladay first met guitarist Matt Palmer and the Seely brothers, lead guitarist Kyle and bassist Hart, who grew up in Syracuse, at Purchase College, New York. Their pal Ian Dykstra was on drums in these days, certainly, Sheer Mag have by no means actually had a everlasting drummer (present touring member Giacomo Zatti is their fourth). Clearly, the shut confinement was intense.

“We only had one day without a show and it was spent travelling on an overnight boat to Finland, so we really didn’t have a day off,” Halladay remembers. “It was freezing cold, I don’t think any of us had headphones, mobile phone data or any distractions. It was a pretty torturous seven weeks, but every single venue and every single person was amazing. Every promoter was like, ‘This is the most people we’ve ever had and the most money we’ve ever made.’ The fans were the only reason we survived.”

Photo: Angela Owens

Four years later, Halladay can snort on the recollections. NME finds the singer recent from a go to to the publish workplace, at residence along with her brother in Philly. She’s getting ready to place her life in a bag as soon as once more to hit the street this week till early November, in assist of recent album ‘A Distant Call’. Another pulverising few months beckon, however Sheer Mag are nicely accustomed by now.

They accomplished their EP sequence with the blistering ‘III’ in 2016, and debut album ‘Need To Feel Your Love’ adopted in 2017, including disco, plus touches of Abba and Fleetwood Mac to the combination. If their debut confirmed their vary, ‘A Distant Call’ stands tall as their most full work up to now, 10 tracks of straight up rock‘n’roll, pressing and unruly. Mixing from Arthur Rizk provides heat and gloss to recordings first tracked within the freezing snow of DeRuyter, New York.

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It’s additionally their most private launch, ruthlessly exposing Halladay’s experiences (by a fictional protagonist, it offers with physique picture points and particulars a whirlwind interval during which she was fired, damaged up with and misplaced her abusive father) in a means that simply wasn’t potential till now. Sheer Mag wanted to develop into inseparable to make this report, and Halladay says freezing collectively of their van 4 years in the past was the primary main step in getting there.

“We’re all incredibly close, we’re like siblings at this point,” she says. “We struggle, we go on [laughs] and annoy one another and yell at one another. We’ve been by so much.”

Photo: Angela Owens

Halladay has come to cherish her relationship with Palmer specifically, after the group’s artistic course of thrust them collectively. Sheer Mag songs are made in a manufacturing line: first, the Seely brothers conjure groove, snap and corkscrew solos, then Halladay and Palmer summon melody and lyrics. On ‘A Distant Call’, Palmer got here to inhabit the singer’s thoughts like by no means earlier than.

“In the writing relationship we have, Matt ends up doing the final arrangements of the melody and lyrics, he writes most of them,” Halladay explains. “Our relationship had to get to this point for him to be able to do justice to my experiences, like my father and our relationship and his death and how that affected me, and body image and just going through the world as a fat woman. It took 24 other songs [on the EPs and ‘Need To Feel Your Love’] to get to the point where he could do it justice and make it really meaningful.”

Photo: Marie Lin

What they got here up with grabs you and doesn’t let go.

“How may I be taught to like from someone so abusive?” asks ‘Cold Sword’. “I pulled again and went away, to nurse my coronary heart’s bruises”. On ‘The Right Stuff’, Halladay sings, “Eyes stare and individuals flip, my coronary heart begins to race and my face burns.”

Looking again, she says, the recording course of was taxing within the excessive.

“The conversation around body image is a lot more open now, so that wasn’t too difficult, but the stuff with my father made me confront some things I’d maybe been ignoring or hadn’t been able to articulate,” Halladay explains. “That was really therapeutic and really hard, I think it was hard for Matt to even attempt it. You don’t want to mess something like that up.”

Perhaps the perfect instance of what she means could be discovered inside ‘Cold Sword’, the album’s motoring centerpiece. You’ll need to dance to its thrusting rhythm, however its message is altogether extra severe.

“It’s about my father and it’s the one that was the most difficult to write, record and deal with,” she says. “I’ve told Matt a lot about mine and my father’s relationship and his actions towards me and the rest of my family. I wrote it all down. I wrote everything I could remember, every experience, like being terrified and upset, just every moment that he terrorised mine and my family’s life. I wrote pages and pages of what I could remember in order and gave it to him to work with.”

Photo: Angela Owens

Elsewhere, in amongst the anxiousness and ache of Halladay’s revelations are bursts of Sheer Mag’s customary imagery: picket traces, crooks, dodgy offers, bombs, jail cells and the mayhem of conflict and politics. These songs are a blur of private candour and common truths, set to unrelenting groove and whole guitar hedonism, providing wonderful distinction to their blackened content material. Bass traces pulsate, guitars shimmy and shake, drums thwack. As at all times, it capabilities as one large rallying name, and Halladay is proud to say so. Sheer Mag are right here to say that the private and political aren’t divisible.

“What a lot of people in the world don’t realise is that politics is in everything,” the singer says. “The life that you live, the food you eat, the people you meet, it all has to do with politics and the way our systems are built and created. The people you’re attracted to, the people you see every day, all those things have to do with politics, so there’s no way to not be political. To say something like, ‘I’m not political’, is just showing your ignorance or your privilege.”

Photo: Angela Owens

Avoiding politics can be “a cop out” for Sheer Mag, and Halladay regales us with some latest drama round planning their tour merchandise for instance the purpose.

“We’re planning to sell a poster that will benefit some Planned Parenthood [sexual healthcare organisation] schemes in Wisconsin and they said, ‘Are there certain places you don’t want to sell it because maybe people will be upset and not agree with it?’” she says.

“Hell no! Anyone opposed to Planned Parenthood is not someone I want to be my fan or be at my shows, so no thank you. I just don’t see how someone who could feel that way would like our music.”

Photo: Angela Owens

Halladay spits out the tip of her sentence, completely mystified. Her confusion is no shock: Sheer Mag’s bond with their followers is apparent. People wait patiently to speak to the band after reveals, forming snaking traces for the merch desk, desperate to get nearer.

“It’s always very overwhelming and awesome, especially women coming up to me and telling me things like, ‘I started a band because of you.’ I’d never expected for people to care so much and be so excited, especially so early on,” says Halladay.

The singer has a idea to clarify the devotion and love, too.

“It’s a lot of [reasons], but the one I feel the most is that I don’t look like every other person in a band and I don’t sing about the same things every other person sings about,” she says. “It’s important for people to see themselves, people can relate to me because I’m other and I’m different and that is important to people.”

Photo: Marie Lin

Halladay noticed the identical in Judas Priest singer Rob Halford and Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, who she describes as her “favourite” (she has Lynott inked on her proper thigh and named her canine The Rocker after him). But whereas she says “this band and me being in it wouldn’t have existed 30 or 40 years ago,” she notes there’s nonetheless “a lot of bullshit to deal with”.

“It’s like, bouncers automatically stopping me and no one else, if I don’t have my [backstage] pass or something,” she explains. “Even promoters who haven’t done their research saying, ‘Oh are you the tour manager? Or are you doing merch?’ I’m just like, ‘No, my picture is on the wall right behind me.’ It’s just ignorance, it’s silly. It makes them look stupid.”

Halladay has acquired used to setting such individuals straight in no unsure phrases. When NME first interviewed the singer at SXSW in 2015, it was after a present at which she shoved a person again into the gang as he came upon stage fumbling on the crotch of his denims. “Get your dick back in your pants dude,” she advised him.

Ever since their earliest days, there’s been a way of necessity about Sheer Mag; they’re a band the world wants and they understand it.

“There are a lot of people who want to see themselves. There are young girls out there who’ve never seen a person who looks like me leading a band like this, that representation and seeing yourself is really important for people to realise their potential and what kind of a person they want to be,” says Halladay. “White men have all of these different role models in the world being shown to them, it’s not the same for everyone.”

Photo: Angela Owens

Sheer Mag, then, current an exciting various. Two albums in, they’re thriving.

“So much rock music in popular culture is so bad and meaningless in my eyes,” Halladay continues. “I love rock‘n’roll, so for people to have to dig so deep to find music that is meaningful sucks.”

Thankfully, it’s not essential to dig to seek out Sheer Mag. They’re nonetheless placing music out by their very own Wilsuns RC imprint, ordering vinyl and dealing with merch, however their stance on the music press has softened and they’re extra seen than ever.

“At the beginning we were just trying to figure out what kind of a band we were, so we didn’t want to just latch onto these ideas or anyone that could take advantage of us or control us,” Halladay says of their preliminary reticence. “At this point we know who we are as a band, we know what we want and we have the confidence and power to say, ‘Ok, people want to hear this, so let’s see what’s important for us to say.’”

As for the mechanics behind constructing their empire, the band now have a supervisor and have simply taken on “people to help us with money and business stuff”. Halladay paints a easy, contented image.

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So, is the label chase over?

“If we are being chased then they’re not contacting me!”

The singer laughs, clearly blissful Sheer Mag are doing this on their very own. Really, it’s the one means it is sensible. Their music comes from a primal place, mixing our most instinctive emotions into hopeful, important rock‘n’roll, stuffed with motion.

“This band, it’s not a want, it’s a need. Every day,” Halladay sums up. “It’s so important and good for me to be able to perform and let out all that aggression, anger and energy inside of me that needs to come out. When I’m not on tour for a long time I lose my shit. I need that release, that feeling, to not feel totally crazy and restless.”

Tina Halladay can’t cover the thrill in her voice and no marvel. Sheer Mag are on the street once more.

A Distant Call

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from Heavy News https://thisisheavynews.com/the-big-read-sheer-mag-so-much-rock-music-is-so-bad-and-meaningless/

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swords-of-truth-blog · 7 years

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Another Man - TNP interview 2017

Up there with the best interviews with TNPS I’ve read, some real insight into their process and mentality, espcially the stuff about them slowing down Aphex Twin songs as kids. (Typed up from the Another Man article earlier in the year...)

WITH A FOURTH THESE NEW PURITANS ALBUM NEARING COMPLETION, THE Barnett TWINS ARE AS UNCOMPROMISING AS EVER

TEXY Paul Moody

These New Puritans would like to get a few things off their chest. First, despite being perennially pegged as part of pop’s privately-educated elite, they are in fact proud sons of Essex whose family tree boats more colourful characters than an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? Secondly, despite internet rumours to the contrary, their debut album Beat Pyramid was not inspired by a Belgian techno outfit in thrall to the mysterious Father Abraham. “Our Wikipedia page says that the biggest influence on our first record was The Smurfs,” Jack Barnett sighs, nursing nothing stronger than a glass of water in an East End bar. “Because of that, 75 per cent of all the interviews we do mention it. I did have that album, and it is good, but y’know…” Barnett’s exasperation at the limitations imposed on his imaginative scope are understandable. Over the last decade, his band – now reduced to a core of Jack Barnett and twin brother George – have blazed, like Halley’s Comet, across the skies of the British music scene. Brilliant and bonkers in equal measure, their three studio albums – 2008’s Beat Pyramid, 2010’s Hidden and 2012’s Field of Reeds – have established These New Puritans as genuine eccentrics whose next move cannot be predicted (Barnett told interviewers at the time of Field of Reeds that the follow up would be “Disney Pop”, sung by an East European vocalist. While this is unlikely, you still wouldn’t bet against it.) Incorporating seemingly random elements ranging from children’s voices to factory noise; Jamaican dance hall to the deepest voice in Britain; a harrier hawk taking flight to the sound of a human skull being smashed (achieved using a Foley technique involving striking a hammer against a melon covered in cream crackers), their ever-changing collision of art rock, electronica, classical and sound collage has seen them move at breath-taking speed. It’s little wonder that some less enlightened observers have been left simply gazing in awe. Signed to Infectious (and Domino outside the UK), they have built a loyal global fan base with an influence far beyond the quick-fix of chart success. In 2007 fashion designer Hedi Slimane commissioned the 15-minute piece Navigate, Navigate for a Dior show in Paris, while celebrity admirers include Suede, who asked them to support at the Royal Albert Hall in 2010, and Elton John, who praised the lush arrangements of Field of Reeds. In April 2014 they inverted the hoary notion of the ‘live album’ by performing songs from their entire back catalogue at the Barbican with the aid of a 35-piece orchestra (captured on the 2015 album Expanded). “I never liked the idea of there being two paths,” says Jack, looking back over their career to date. “There’s one where you can be successful, and the other where you can be experimental. The art is combining the two. The irony is that, in my head, I always think we’re making pop music. It’s only when I look at the reality of pop that I see it’s really banal.” Barnett’s own reputation as a composer has also grown exponentially. In 2015 he was musical director of a stage production of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World. Set in the modern day, this involved writing short pieces to mirror – among other things – the sound of someone perusing their Facebook wall. “Jack’s music always has extraordinary range: there is so much in the way of colour, texture and variety to it,” says Jame Dacre, the show’s artistic director. “As a composer he combines an innate and passionate understanding of storytelling with an astonishing musical range and technical rigour.” For Barnett, it was exactly the kind of challenge he thrives on: both cerebral and sonically challenging. To create the effect of Soma – the euphoric narcotic on which Huxley’s population is hooked – he used an obscure digital technique called Harmor resynthesis; for the slogans used by the World State, a barrage of hyper-oscillating noise. “At that time a lot of people were writing about dystopias, but they imagined violence and repression being the thing that oppressed people rather than banal pleasures,” he says, still fascinated by the subject. “It’s exactly those psychological weaknesses that oppress people now. We’re constantly presented with mediocre luxury – like being in business class in a plane rather than economy. In real terms, there’s almost no difference – an Amazonian tribesman wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. It makes you think, is that really all people aspire to?” If These New Puritans are unlike any other band, they are also completely unlike each other. Pale and intense, Jack chooses his words with the care of a Scrabble grandmaster. Resident in Berlin since 2014, he’s a committed Europhile, citing 19th-century Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol and Lithuanian filmmaker Sarunas Bartas as current inspirations. George – the older twin by a minute – is positively cavalier in comparison. A highly successful model who has fronted campaigns for Burberry, Valentino and Lanvin among others, you sense that, as well as playing drums and contributing lyrics, he acts as a vital sounding board for his brother’s more extravagant flights of fancy. “We just pursue the music,” he says, explaining that his regular EasyJet trips to Berlin from his London home are as much about mapping TNP’s direction as their sound. “We have similar beliefs about things. It’s been like that since we were kids.” For These New Puritans, home is where the art is. Brough up by their mum (an art teacher) and dad (a builder) in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, their maverick approach mirrors that of the town itself – local alumni include musician Vivian Stanshall, Helen Mirren and novelist John Fowles. Growing up, music was never far away. “Our mum was good friends with Wilko Johnson and (Dr Feelgood vocalist) Lee Brilleaux, so we would knock about with his kids,” Jack explains. “And our dad was a huge reggae fan,” George adds dryly. “He was into Steel Pulse, smoking weed, and being the only white guy there.” Their musical awakening came seeing Sparks and Captain Beefheart on re-runs of The Old Grey Whistle Test. By eight, the twins were already writing songs, with their roles clearly defined – Jack on guitar and George on drums. “I used to listen to The Velvet Underground when I was ten,” Jack says of their advanced progress. “But I never once thought about the words or what they meant. They weren’t important to me – it was all about the sound.” As teenagers the pair would hole up in the loft, slowing down Aphex Twin tracks to quarter speed to figure out how they were created. However, drawn towards the thriving post-punk scene centred around Southend’s Junk Club, they were soon playing gigs of their own, confusing audiences around the country with their ever-evolving sound. “Our music was changing so quickly,” Jack says with a grin. “A promoter would book us three months in advance to play at some indie club. By the time we turned up we wouldn’t be playing any of the songs they wanted to hear. Instead it would be the noisiest music you can imagine.” “People have this idea we’re from an indie background because we used guitars on (debut album) Beat Pyramid,” George adds. “If anything, that’s the exception. We’ve always been into electronic music.” The band’s eureka moment came in 2010’s Hidden. A complete volte-face, it combined a glacial sonic assault with word-salad couplets such as Three Thousand’s “Wear fun death-suit / Tropical design / Blade grammar to the death / Everybody run.” Voted NME’s Album of the Year, it cast them as sonic adventurers in the mould of Sigur Rós and Radiohead, a reputation bolstered by 2013’s stunning Field of Reeds. A combination of lush symphonics and woozy electronica, it nodded to everyone from (fellow Essex natives) Talk Talk to conductors André de Ridder and Hans Ek *, positioning them firmly as a neo-classical outfit. So where will these shape-shifting pop chameleons go next? After two years in Jack’s Berlin studio, their new album is, he says, “7t per cent finished”. While they admit to absorbing ideas from everyone from Stockhausen to electronic label Tri Angle Records – notably Rabit – they’re deliberately vague on details. One thing is for certain, however: it won’t be their ‘Berlin album’. “I hate that idea,” Jack says, recoiling at the thought. “The new album sounds like us. I can’t think of any other way of describing it.” I can, however, say that the drumming is brilliant,” George adds. He explains that the music they’re working on is both “brutal and beautiful”, with a central theme of “transcendence”. “We’ve got this phrase: don’t dream backwards, dream forwards,” he says. “I think that sums up the way we’re thinking. Look to the future, not the past.” They both stress that this aim is only achievable without the digital trickery of compression, reverb and distortion. “In the 60s and 70s they were trying to get as hi-fidelity as they could,” says Jack with an air of exasperation. “Why hang on to something that is pre-existing? It’s much more interesting to go forwards and make something clear and pristine.” ** This seems as good a place as any to leave them. In a world increasingly dominated by brazen self-promotion, These New Puritans’ refusal to talk themselves up is a breath of fresh air. At 27, you get the sense that the remarkable Barnett brothers are only getting started on their journeys through sound. “I have always seen the role of the artist as transporting the listener away from grim reality,” says Jack in conclusion. “There are ways out. That’s music to me. We don’t want to change to have success. If anything, I like the idea of the world changing around us.”

* = André de Ridder was conductor on Field of Reeds but Hans Ek is in fact an arranger ** = The author has perhaps misconstrued something Jack and George have said in many earlier interviews, that in the 1950’s producers aimed for sonic perfection, but by the 1960’s and 1970’s they wanted distortion, which TNP don’t like.

#These New Puritans #experimental #artrock #art rock #Brave New World #Berlin #Essex #Aphex Twin #Talk Talk #Another Man

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1dhomeroom · 7 years

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Harry Styles didn’t just become a rock star – he always was one

Let’s stop pretending that boy bands and rock bands are direct opposites.

Harry Styles has undergone a radical transformation. Say goodbye to the manufactured, sweet-cheeked pop baby of yore, and say hello to the authentic rock star of tomorrow. This is the narrative the vast majority of coverage of his debut, self-titled album (released today) will offer you.

The New York Post led with how “Harry Styles went from teeny-bop to classic rock”, after “years of being cooped up in the cage of One Direction”, leading to a shift in “the teen-girl hysteria” that followed 1D “like a screeching shadow.” The Daily Mail quipped that he has moved “in a very different direction”, while Metro agreed the album is “a definite departure from his One Direction days.”

“One Direction’s fans have grown up” NME wrote, and “Harry’s music has too.” Buzzfeed announced that “Harry Styles Isn’t Following The Pop Star Playbook”, while Stereogum headlined their review “Harry Styles, Prince Of Pop, Takes A Stab At Rock Stardom”, opening with “Here’s a sign of the times for you: The most famous member of the world’s leading boy band is trying to become a rock star”. The Telegraph’s review found the departure so stark that it offered the following intensely patronising speculation: “It is so old-fashioned it may actually come across as something new to its target audience. After all, most One Direction fans wouldn’t even have been twinkles in their parents’ eyes when this kind of ragged confection was all the rage.” Because, tragically, society has still not discovered a way to make music from the past available to modern ears.

Of course, there is some truth in the observation that this is not a One Direction album. More relaxed, dishevelled and playful than any One Direction product, Styles experiments with a diverse range of influences on this debut, and lyrically, you can absolutely tell that these are the most sincere words of a 23-year-old, not an experienced adult songwriter trying to get inside the brain of a teenager.

But fans of the band will see this album as a natural next step for Styles after One Direction’s increasingly classic rock-influenced songs. After their first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, the band began to become more guitar-heavy and nostalgic: established publications were outraged that Midnight Memories’ lead single “Best Song Ever” dared to reference The Who, while the bands final two albums – Four and Made in the AM, are packed with varied rock references, particularly songs on which Styles has a writing credit, even if more traditional music press insisted the albums remained “bubble-gum”.

Harry even chose to play one of these One Direction tracks on his Today appearance this week, Four’s “Stockholm Syndrome”, which takes the experience of being taken hostage as its central (potentially problematic) conceit. It’s a favourite amongst fans who never thought they’d devote themselves so sincerely to a boy band – “Baby, look what you’ve done to me.” It sounded complimentary to the songs he played from the new album “Carolina”, “Sign of the Times” and “Ever Since New York”. For me, “Sweet Creature”, the second single from Styles’s debut, is a natural extension of One Direction’s “I Want To Write You a Song” and tracks co-written by Styles, “If I Could Fly” and “Walking in the Wind”.

In terms of music, then, Harry hasn’t made as radical a departure as many suggest – so why is the predominant narrative still one of an aspiring rock artist desperately hoping to shake off his pop past? Certainly, he’s long looked like a rock star – always the most androgynous and bohemian of his bandmates, experimenting with floral suits, women’s jeans and heeled boots. Pictures of the four boys together sometimes seemed as though they were taken in an alternative universe where Marc Bolan had accidentally stumbled accross Take That on the red carpet. He single-handedly brought back the pussy-bow, for God’s sake. He’s always had the charisma of a rock star, the mystery, the mischievousness, and the style of a rock star.

Styles is, in fact, very much the traditional rock star – his very appeal may be due to the fact that he is the most traditional one we’ve had in years. Like McCartney, John Lennon, David Bowie, Jagger, Marc Bolan, or Kurt Cobain, Styles is creative, interested in fashion, androgynous, boyish and followed around the world by a stream of enthusiastic fans, who are mostly young women. Like boy bands past and present, the rock canon is littered with pretty boys with ambiguous sexualities engaging in over the top homosocial bonding on stage – Harry could not tick these boxes more enthusiastically. Harry Styles didn’t just become a rock star overnight – he always was one.

The boy band is still often seen as the antithesis of the rock band, despite their many cultural similarities in terms of audience and marketing. In fact, bands like The 1975 and Blossoms are exploiting those overlaps by positioning themselves somewhere between boy band and rock group. But the boy band remains dismissed and derided while rock groups are mythologised and worshipped as art.

One person who seems less interested in this particular narrative is Styles himself. In his Rolling Stone interview, Styles said of One Direction, “I love the band, and would never rule out anything in the future. The band changed my life, gave me everything.” He went on to celebrate the young women who have supported his career. “Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music – short for popular, right? – have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it?”

In a small cinema in Notting Hill last night, Styles hosted an intimate screening of a new documentary, Harry Styles: Behind The Album, for a group of fans from One Direction’s golden age. After introducing it, he stayed to watch from the side-lines. The hour-long film is a striking look at the last year or so of Styles’s life, including clips of him drinking and swimming in Jamaica, lounging around in Hawaiian shirts snoozing in the ocean on a surfboard; shots of his much-discussed haircut of 2016; an impressive Bob Dylan impression; and several minutes devoted to Styles’s bromance with his guitarist Mitch Rowland, with clips of them flirting and exchanging guitars and declarations of love. (The album’s executive producer, Jeff Bhasker, told the New York Post of Rowland, “He’s kind of like the Keith Richards to Harry’s Mick Jagger. That type of dynamic between the lead guitar player and the singer needs to exist for the type of music Harry wants to do.”)

About 15 minutes in to the documentary, we cut to black and white clips of One Direction playing their biggest stadium shows, while Harry reflects on the strangeness of the narrative being imposed upon him. “When you leave a band – a boy band – you feel like you have to go in a completely different direction, and say, ‘Don’t worry everyone, I hated it, it wasn’t me.’”

He pauses and smiles.

“I loved it.”

Cheers erupted from the fans in the row in front of me.

“And I don’t feel like I have to apologise for that. I never felt like I was faking it.”

Perhaps the main thing that separates Styles from some of his rock counterparts is his enormous respect for pop music, young women, and the extraordinary dynamic that can emerge between an artist and their fans. Whether this is a calculated fan-servicing move or not – it’s one that critics should aspire to.

“The thing with the band,” Harry continues in the documentary, “was that it went so well, from the start, that it almost felt like everything had to get a little bigger each time. I think at some point it’s quite stressful. There’s only so high you can go, at some point you’re not going to make that expectation. Going out on a high and now feeling like I’m starting afresh, I came to terms with the fact that that was so great, and if I never get to do that on that level again, that’s okay.”

Styles has confronted the fact that the sweaty combination of youth, beauty, hype, and sheer devotion that propelled him and his bandmates to ridiculous levels of fame is unsustainable. To keep moving forward, he knows they had to change. But changing, for Styles, isn’t a simply clean break. And it doesn’t involve discarding, rebranding or disowning the people who helped him get where he is.

Harry Styles is out now. Harry Styles: Behind The Album is out on Monday on Apple Music.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2017/05/harry-styles-solo-one-direction-rock-pop-boyband

"I loved it." ... past tense

#harry styles #harry.styles #newstatesman #past

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