{"id":556668,"date":"2026-03-22T08:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T08:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/556668\/"},"modified":"2026-03-22T08:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T08:52:08","slug":"harry-styles-looks-to-be-here-for-the-duration-he-deserves-to-be-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/556668\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry Styles looks to be here for the duration. He deserves to be \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI have a new hobby,\u201d Sandra H\u00fcller<\/a> said recently. \u201cI try to sneak in a karaoke scene in every film.\u201d<\/p>\n

The German actor doesn\u2019t always succeed. I am pretty sure she didn\u2019t get a song into Jonathan Glazer\u2019s forbidding Zone of Interest. But, in Maren Ade\u2019s Toni Erdmann, a critical smash from 2016, she belted out a version of Whitney Houston\u2019s Greatest Love of All that brought down the house at the film\u2019s Cannes premiere. <\/p>\n

She is at it again. At a crucial juncture in Project Hail Mary<\/a>, an epic sci-fi starring Ryan Gosling<\/a> that\u2019s currently in cinemas, H\u00fcller makes a defiant anthem of Harry Styles<\/a>\u2019 Sign of the Times. The world might be coming to an end. She and fellow scientists are about to attempt an insane scheme \u2013 hence the title \u2013 to preserve humanity. \u201cWelcome to the final show,\u201d she sings. \u201cI hope you\u2019re wearing your best clothes. You can\u2019t bribe the door on your way to the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, that is eerily appropriate for one last roll of the intergalactic dice.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a great scene. The film\u2019s directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, extract every ounce of emotional oomph from the surrounding lachrymosity. H\u00fcller, whose character has hitherto been Teutonically buttoned up, gets to hint at the bubbling stress within. And we hear one of the past decade\u2019s undisputed bangers.<\/p>\n

Here are some questions. How did we end up with a Harry Styles number? How did he get to where he is? Is he there for the duration? H\u00fcller launched her informal karaoke project with the most unapologetically sentimental number identified with the already legendary Houston. Now she turns to someone who, with his bandmates from One Direction, came third in The X Factor.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found a song of Harry Styles,\u201d H\u00fcller explained. \u201cI asked my daughter if it\u2019s actually a cool song, and she said, \u2018Yes, it is.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeah, maybe. You could make the case that, among male stars (not Adele, in other words), only Ed Sheeran<\/a> is a bigger British draw. But, with the best will in the world, even that megabusker\u2019s biggest fans would struggle to argue that he was cool. His entire shtick is that he\u2019s just an ordinary bloke. Success and \u201ccool\u201d are not necessarily synonymous.<\/p>\n

It is not easy to emerge from a boy band with uncorrupted hipness, but Styles does seem to have managed it. There is none of the brutish swagger with which Robbie Williams, after leaving Take That, managed to win over refugees from the Oasis blowout. Styles is a bit mysterious. He is a bit oblique. <\/p>\n

And that is before we get to supposedly daring experiments in fashion that, if experts are to be believed, go beyond the mere wearing of spangled dungarees. \u201cSome of Styles\u2019s choices have fed into an important political discussion about gendered fashion,\u201d Tom Lamont told us<\/a> in The Guardian. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton weren\u2019t having \u201cimportant political discussions\u201d about Williams\u2019s Adidas tracksuits. I can tell you that much.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Harry Styles in a dress. A South County Dublin parent writes…Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Styles is interesting, but he is not too interesting. He does not suck enough attention from casual fans (the insanely dedicated will stay loyal whatever happens) to wear down interest. Look where he has got to. The singer has passed his 32nd birthday and, if sales of Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally<\/a>, his latest album, are any measure, he has weathered the journey into pre-middle age with aplomb. <\/p>\n

Later this year he will embark on a 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden. Ticketmaster tells us that about 11.5 million people registered for a presale code that allows booking. And those tickets aren\u2019t cheap.<\/p>\n

This amiable, polite son of middle-class parents from the English regions \u2013 first Worcestershire and then Cheshire \u2013 can, as a child, scarcely have imagined he\u2019d become a defining star of the century\u2019s first quarter. He delivered papers. He worked in a bakery. He sang a bit of karaoke. All preparation for a normal life in normal parts of the world.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Harry Styles proves the art of a great album title is not deadOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The enormous success of One Direction came with pressures. He expressed relief, upon going solo, that he no longer had to sign \u201ccleanliness clauses\u201d rendering contracts null and void if he got up to anything \u201cunsavoury\u201d. As things worked out, there were no subsequent decadent meltdowns. Instead he mutated into a perfectly modulated star for a generation at home with all sorts of ambiguity. <\/p>\n

One more point. This may not be the most important thing, but it still matters: the songs are good. Watermelon Sugar and As It Was were among the most captivatingly slinky numbers of the early 2020s. Sign of the Times, his debut single, from 2017, eventually accumulated enough resonance to serve as the centrepiece to a $248 million science-fiction blockbuster.<\/p>\n

He may be here to stay. He deserves to be here to stay.<\/p>\n

Project Hail Mary is in cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI have a new hobby,\u201d Sandra H\u00fcller said recently. \u201cI try to sneak in a karaoke scene in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,14661,134,41144,20708,136,109276,24481,245202,229152],"class_list":["post-556668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-ed-sheeran","tag-entertainment","tag-for-you","tag-harry-styles","tag-music","tag-one-direction","tag-ryan-gosling","tag-sandra-huller","tag-your-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}