Harry AU Meme:

Exclusive interview: Harry Styles on his new album and life after One Direction

The last thing Harry Styles does before he goes to bed each night is send himself an email listing what he’s doing the next day. “Even if it’s really boring, like ‘9am: coffee’. If you have no plans, you’re at a loss sometimes. I find it difficult to drift.”

He thinks it’s probably a hangover from his six years in one of the biggest boybands of all time, One Direction, where every minute of their lives on tour was relentlessly micromanaged. World tours could last nearly a year — and they didn’t just involve playing stadiums. There was also endless promo to do during the day and recording sessions during “downtime”. One Direction: This Is Us — the 2013 behind-the-scenes documentary by the Super Size Me film-maker Morgan Spurlock — captured his bandmate Zayn Malik being hauled mercilessly out of his tour bus bunk bed, 10 minutes after falling asleep, to record a vocal line for a new song.

After Malik quit the band in early 2015, he published a book explaining how the intensely regimented schedule led to him developing an eating disorder. “I didn’t feel like I had control over anything else in my life, but food was something I could control, so I did,” he wrote. In contrast, Styles seems to have thrived on the discipline.

“I love routine,” he explains. “You have it when you’re younger. You have school at this time, so breakfast at this time, you get up at this time. Even when people finish school, it’s a bit tough to know what to do with yourself.”

Perhaps it was a way for him to hold onto some of that youth. He was 16 when he moved from Cheshire to London as an X Factor hopeful. It was 2010, the year Simon Cowell groomed five nubile teenage boys who hadn’t made it through the solo auditions to form a supergroup. Styles became the most famous and lusted-after member of what quickly became the most famous and lusted-after boyband in the world. According to this year’s Rich List, he is now worth £40m. Now 23, Styles is experimenting with being master of his own universe. One Direction went on “indefinite hiatus” last year and he has spent the intervening months writing and recording his debut solo album and filming his first movie role for Christopher Nolan’s war epic, Dunkirk, due for release this summer. The album is called Harry Styles — perhaps the most breathlessly anticipated solo record since Robbie left Take That. Its first single, Sign of the Times — a swooping, bombastic, 5½-minute ballad — topped the charts in 84 countries on the day of its release. But the moment it really hits me what an enormous deal he is is when he calls me out of the blue one Friday afternoon to arrange our interview.