“And now tell the person on your right that you love them. And the person on your left. And then close your eyes and say it to yourself,” Harry Styles urges his audience in the packed Olympiahalle during his concert. The thousands of fans follow this order devotedly, after all, Styles is on a world tour under the motto “Love On Tour”, and if there is anything in abundance this evening, it is love and volume.
The fans had to hold out for two years because the “Fine Line” tour for Harry Styles album of the same name had to be postponed due to the pandemic. The Brit’s third solo album has now been released. It’s through the band formed in the talent show “X-Factor”. one direction became famous and since the start of his solo career has experienced ongoing heroization as a figurehead of a new, colourful, enlightened generation as well as a fashion icon (he was the first man to cover the cover of the Vogue graced) and is also cast as an actor. “Harry’s House” is the name of the new album and is celebrated by fans as a metaphor for the feeling of inclusion and security that the 28-year-old conveys to them.
Styles kicks off the show with the record’s opener, “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” sprinting in red-pink leather pants and a white-and-red shirt to the 80’s-inspired song with the thick baseline that sounds like Quincy Jones did had his fingers in the pie, across the stage. This is followed by the hits “Golden” and “Adore You” by “Fine Line”. When Harry Styles wants to introduce himself afterwards, he can’t because there’s so much screaming. A few new songs follow, a few of them exposed on the stage by two musicians.
Kudos to the mustache dads with the pink shirts
The new album is stylistically different from the previous one, which contributed significantly to Harry Styles’ status as a contemporary pop icon. With “Fine Line” Styles has also changed its own – fashionable – style, flared trousers, feather boas, frilled shirts came along. At the concert, some songs from “Harry’s House” show that a small club tour would suit them – for example, when the melancholic “Keep driving” is yelled at over it. With the anthemic “Lights Up” it gets stadium-worthy again. Styles flirts with his fans during the concert, praises fathers for their mustaches and pink shirts, and rituals that date back to the boy band One Direction are celebrated: Styles calls out “This is a family show” and then mischievously to ask “…or is it?”.
Styles has been saying this sentence at all concerts for more than ten years and thus also sums up the change in his own status: in the boy band he was first the cute one with the curly hair, in later phases of the band he became the long-haired Dirty Harry, whom the Besieged by tabloids for his affairs with Victoria’s Secret models, and during his solo career he’s become a supporter – albeit a controversial one – of the LGBTQIA movement. On the one hand, Styles is praised for making the queer community visible, on the other hand, there are those who accuse him of using queer motifs for commercial reasons.
When the first Pride flag is raised, Styles says it fits perfectly with his three-song “Disco Medley,” and by track two, “Treat People With Kindness,” it’s once again a family show. The song has rock opera bonds and exudes a musical mood. Styles flirts with one hand on his hip, and whenever the mood in the hall boils so high that it seems impossible to increase it, he goes one better. For example when he calls “wait for it”, gets the audience excited about the chorus and then counts to four in German – and it starts again, with even more power, even more ecstasy. This is even increased when he unpacks the One Direction mega hit “What Makes You Beautiful”.
The six-piece band is introduced with a lot of respect by Styles, three of whom he has been playing with for a long time. Guitarist Mitch Rowland is the opposite of Harry Styles, while he runs and dances and laughs, the guitarist stands there stoically with his instrument, in the more than two hour long party he hardly makes a face. Together with multi-instrumentalist Ny Oh and drummer Sarah Jones, he forms the core of the band.
During the concert, Styles occasionally catches a glimpse of the screens behind him as he sings and can watch himself as his legend-making tirelessly continues. The big poses like the microphone stand stretched into the sky in “Love of my life” have recently brought Styles comparisons with Freddy Mercury. The comparisons to musicians from previous decades are just as varied as the megastar’s outfits. Styles is either mentioned in the same breath with David Bowie and Elton John – when it comes to the looks – or with Robbie Williams when the solo success of a former boy band member is the topic.
And therein lies a bit the crux of the matter: What Harry Styles is doing is not new. Men who rock stages in women’s clothing and who blur gender boundaries often took to the stage in the second half of the last century. Of course, it’s not Harry Styles’ fault that it’s an indictment of society in the 21st century, that it’s enough for a white and probably heterosexual man not to behave like an asshole and thus be celebrated as an icon of a new generation.
Harry Styles has mastered about two and a half dance steps, which he likes to vary (left hip, right hip, shoulder roll with bent arms), a new addition with “As it was” is the happy jumping, in which he throws all his limbs away. The song is a single from the current album. Along with the ballad “Sign of the Times,” which made Styles a hit solo artist in 2017, the sexy summer hit “Watermelon Sugar High,” and the live-only “Medicine,” the song is one of the encores.
Yes, it’s a show for the whole family. Colorful, loud, inclusive, this family gives their hero the love he desires for his tour.