Indholdsfortegnelse for How Well Do You Know Harry? i How Well Do You Know Harry?

He’s a singer, an actor, a fashion icon and one of the biggest stars in the world, but how well do you really know Harry Styles? If you’re reading this, then we imagine the answer is pretty well, but inside you’re sure to discover even more! And that’s not all, you can also test your Harry knowledge with our fun and fiendish quiz questions and compare your results with friends to see who really knows Harry best! Covering everything from Harry’s school days and his first band to his X Factor adventure, his time in One Direction, his solo endeavours and his move into Hollywood, there’s something for even the biggest Harry fans to learn and questions to test even the most hardcore Stylers! In each article you’ll find three…

Harry had been a singer in private since his childhood, later citing Freddie Mercury, Elvis Presley and The Beatles as his musical influences, but he’d never seriously considered joining a band. One day, though, when Harry and his friend Nick Clough were working at a bakery shop, a customer asked Nick as he was serving at the counter, who was singing out the back. It was Harry, who was warbling away to himself while sweeping up outside. “Have you ever thought about singing professionally? If you ever consider it, give me a call,” said the unnamed customer, and although Harry never got around to doing so, the spark had been ignited. He and Nick would jam at Harry’s house, with Nick playing guitar while Harry sang along or played a…

What’s a boy band to do when their booking agent has lined up shows around the world, but their record company wants new music? There’s only one thing for it – get the new songs recorded on the road. This is not as easy as it sounds. The Take Me Home tour of early 2013 may have involved long flights and endless waiting around to soundcheck, but that doesn’t mean the 1D boys were in the mood for making new music. On the contrary, they were probably exhausted – but like the troopers they are, they knuckled down and got it done. On the way, they would flip hotel-room beds up against the wall so that the rooms could function as makeshift recording studios, grabbing a few minutes before their…

When Simon Cowell was asked by Rolling Stone what the best way was to ensure the longevity of a band, he told them: “Be sensible and treat them as human beings, genuinely. That’s the most important thing. Traditionally, record companies would put out the most possible product in a short period of time, thinking you only have two or three years. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case now. If you’re sensible and you don’t burn them out, you don’t have to put a time limit on this any more. And they’re so young, these guys.” How does that ethos square with the One Direction story? Well, they did last five years before calling it a day, in fairness: that’s a long time in the fickle world of teenage pop, because something…

If you have a year off between the split of your band and your debut album, how do you spend your time? Why, acting in a big-budget Hollywood movie, of course. Harry pulled off the neat trick in 2016 of acting in a film that was a) really good, b) offered him a cool part that he didn’t mess up, and c) got great reviews. Many a veteran movie actor would give a kidney to be guaranteed those three advantages, but Harry really lucked out with Christopher Nolan’s World War II epic, Dunkirk. “The movie is so ambitious,” he said. “Some of the stuff they’re doing in this movie is insane. And it was hard, physically really tough, but I love acting. I love playing someone else. I’d sleep really…

Charitable causes have always been part and parcel of Harry’s creative endeavours, whether as a solo artist, with One Direction, or as part of a larger collective of musicians. The first of these came as early as 2010, when he and 1D collaborated on an X Factor charity single that raised money for the armed forces charity Help For Heroes. Their song was a version of David Bowie’s anthemic ‘Heroes’. In 2013, One Direction were involved in that year’s Comic Relief campaign, which ultimately raised more than £100 million for various causes. Rather than simply donating money, 1D flew to Accra, the capital of the African country of Ghana, where they filmed a series of video diaries. These clips, revealing the inadequacy of the city’s medical facilities, are hard to…

“Acclaimed as a musician, beloved as a performer, and praised for his songwriting, Harry pulled it all together for his third record” Harry’s House, released on 20 May 2022, marks the point in Harry’s career where everything converged in his favour. Acclaimed as a musician, beloved as a performer, and praised for his songwriting and activism, Harry pulled it all together for his third record, which enjoyed the best first-week sales of his career. It debuted at the top of the charts in the UK, the USA, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland; sold more than half a million units in North America; and broke a record with four singles in the US Top 10 in the same week. Critics loved…

“Some sources cited Harry’s birthplace as Evesham as the family lived there. We know now that it was Redditch – and that’s that!” Harry Edward Styles was born on 1 February 1994 at the Alexandra Hospital in the town of Redditch in Worcestershire, although his birth was registered in the nearby town of Bromsgrove. This caused some confusion, which was only settled in later years when, in response to questions from Harry’s fans, his father Des tweeted: ‘He was born in Redditch, we were there just in time!’ This didn’t quite solve the problem, though: some sources cited Harry’s birthplace as Evesham, also in Worcestershire, because the family lived there when he was born, and also Holmes Chapel, in Cheshire, as they moved there a few years later. Still, we…

You can thank Harry’s mother, Anne Twist, for making her son into a megastar – because it was her idea to get him to try out for The X Factor. “I’d gone because my mum told me I was good from singing in the car,” Harry later recalled, “but your mum tells you things to make you feel good, so you take it with a pinch of salt. I didn’t really know what I was expecting when I went on there.” What Harry had was plenty of support from his mum Anne and stepfather Robin, who were at the first audition in Manchester on 11 April 2010, wearing shirts displaying his name. Will Sweeny was also there, the boys having taken a cheeky day off school to take their shot…

“They were the first British group to have their debut album reach Number One in the United States” Harry knew that One Direction had struck gold with their first album – Up All Night, an apt title given his band’s leisure and work schedules – when he heard the song ‘What Makes You Beautiful’. Written by Savan Kotecha, the song impressed Harry so much that he sent Savan a text reading simply, ‘I think you got it. I think you got the one here’. Savan, delighted with this, kept the text. If there was any doubt that One Direction had a bright future ahead of them, it was dispelled permanently when Up All Night made them the first British group to have their debut album reach Number One in the United States.…

There was little respite for One Direction in 2014. A new album was on the way for the fourth year in a row, with the expected mega-tour of stadiums accompanying it, and on top of that the band would be filming a live documentary called Where We Are: The Concert Film. The clear requirement was that Harry and his comrades would look and sound on top form: given the relatively short shelf-life of any pop band, a drop in professional standards signals the end of the road sooner rather than later. No pressure, then… The documentary was filmed at the end of June at the San Siro Stadium in Milan. The director, Paul Dugdale, knew what he was doing, having previously worked with heavyweights such as Adele, Coldplay and The…

“Harry needed a break, so the Caribbean also functioned as a place to relax and recharge as well as a songwriting hangout” Most artists retreat to their bedrooms to write songs, but Harry Styles isn’t most artists, and when the time came to write songs for his debut solo album, he took off to Jamaica. In fairness to him, after the split from One Direction in 2015 and the exhausting filming of Dunkirk the following year – which you can read about in our next chapter – he needed a break, so the Caribbean also functioned as a place to relax and recharge as well as a songwriting hangout. Harry had already secured a manager in the form of Jeffrey Azoff’s Full Stop Management, as well as landing in the books of…

No one knows the boy-band phenomenon better than a former boy-band star, and so it was for Ronan Keating a few years back. The some-time Boyzone heart-throb for millions, whose music – like that of One Direction, if not quite as evolved – was inescapable through most of the Nineties, was arriving at Heathrow on a flight from Los Angeles. Observing hundreds of screaming fans, he chuckled in amusement: “Sadly not for me, ha ha! One Direction were on the flight… Those were the days!” Make no mistake, Harry’s fans can make a noise as loud or louder than any former tribe of pop-star followers, whether that’s the legions who adored The Beatles in the Sixties, the Bay City Rollers in the Seventies, Duran Duran in the Eighties, or Take…

Times have changed for pop stars on tour: today’s backstage world is less about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and more about accountants’ meetings, green tea and working out. It has to be this way: unlike the bad old days of the Seventies to the Nineties, everything a celeb does now is on camera and on social media; legal agreements keep mouths closed and lawyers rich; and there’s so much money flowing that any element of legal or physical risk is removed from the situation. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because the average dressing-room is a healthier place to be than it was 40 years ago – but at the same time, you have to ask yourself if today’s pop star actually has any fun on tour. In the…

In the last decade, the issues of gender politics and mental health, and how those two subjects intersect at a place of tolerance and acceptance, have been at the forefront of young people’s conversations – and not a moment too soon. Progression in those areas has been highlighted and assisted by the efforts of high-profile stars such as Harry Styles, making those issues more visible and – we hope, at least – making life easier for anyone struggling for clarity and identity. This is why his slogan ‘Treat People With Kindness’ has been so important. The four-word phrase began life as a song on 2019’s Fine Line album, of course, and generally abbreviated to ‘TPWK’ afterwards. A glorious few minutes of musical drama, the song distilled the idea that being…

Harry’s fans gasped in amazement at the end of the 2021 movie Eternals when, in a mid-credits scene, their hero walked out of a tunnel dressed in a Marvel superhero costume and announced himself as Eros, brother of supervillain Thanos. He looked great, and hit his marks as instructed – but his accent, supposedly American but weaving back and forth to English and everywhere in between, was a bit of a mess. Still, that can be fixed… The following year, Harry was back in cinemas in not one but two movies. The first, Don’t Worry Darling, sees him alongside his partner at the time Olivia Wilde – who was also the director – plus Florence Pugh, Chris Pine and other known cinema names. The film’s production was troubled, with actor…

As a four-year-old, Harry went to Hermitage Primary School in Holmes Chapel, where his first teacher, Mrs Vernon, did a great job of looking after him. We know this because when he played a massive show at the Old Trafford stadium in Manchester in June 2022, he stopped the show and said, “This is an absolute pleasure to be here at my home show, I cannot begin to tell you how much it means to me to play here tonight and all of you for coming. Some of the happiest times of my entire life have been making these last couple of albums, and some of the happiest times of my life have been right around the corner from here. So it feels pretty perfect to me playing these songs…

Harry wasn’t disappointed for long – because a phone call soon came from the production team at The X Factor, asking him if he’d like to return and compete in the ‘Bands’ category. Simon Cowell had been impressed with Harry and four other competitors in the ‘Boys’ category – Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik (like you don’t know that already!) – and arranged for all five to form a new group. The new band gelled immediately. “The minute they stood there for the first time together – it was a weird feeling,” said Cowell in Rolling Stone. “They just looked like a group at that point. I had a good feeling, but then obviously we had about a five-week wait where they had to work together.…

With a heavy travel schedule ahead of One Direction, Take Me Home was the perfect title for their second album, which came out in time for Christmas 2012. The boys were still excited about their newfound good fortune and enjoying their lifestyles, but the life of a pop band is a tough one, so the fact that some of the new songs were a little melancholy was no surprise. Not that any of this affected the production or the commercial performance of the new record. With an established sound based on upbeat pop with guitar elements, Take Me Home continued the mission that had begun with Up All Night. Recorded in Stockholm once again, with Savan Kotecha, Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub at the helm, the album was populated with…

We tend to think of our pop stars as pretty open-minded when it comes to what they wear, don’t we? But take a closer look at the average boy band and consider what they’re wearing. Since the dawn of time (around 1988), all boy bands have worn a) sports footwear, b) a T-shirt, sometimes with a logo, c) jeans, baggy or skinny, and d) an accessory such as a bandana or oversized jewellery. The uniform hasn’t actually changed that much over the decades. Harry Styles has done more than most of his colleagues in boy-band world to push that envelope out and generate a look of his own. As a teenager, he loved the obvious Ray-Bans, Adidas and Nike trainers, and Ralph Lauren polo shirts, but that soon changed. In the…

If you search YouTube for Harry Styles, you get more than 30 million results, which – assuming each one lasts a couple of minutes – would take you 100 years to watch, so any article examining Harry’s presence on your phone or computer screen is doomed to fail. Ask us about Harry on TV, though, and we can cover a lot of ground quite quickly, although you’ll have to exclude music awards shows that have been broadcast on telly or we’ll be here all day. The X Factor 2010 was obviously the first time that any of us saw Harry’s smiling face on TV, and when One Direction became stratospherically famous, they were all over every British talk show you want to mention. Streaming video wasn’t really a thing back…

Over the 13 years since Harry first became famous, he’s been nominated for hundreds of awards, winning many of them. The numbers speak for themselves. One Direction have sold more than 70 million albums to date, qualifying them as one of the best-selling boy bands of all time, and in a single year – 2013 – earned a massive $75 million, making them the second-highest earning celebrity (the five singers making up a single celeb, so to speak) under the age of 30. According to the Forbes organisation that makes this kind of list, 1D were the fourth-highest-earning celebrities in the world in 2015 and the second in 2016. Think about what that means for a moment. As for physical trophies of the sort that you can take home and…