Until I was assigned the Swift job, I had never heard of Harry Styles. Whenever I had inadvertently glimpsed his face on the internet or the tabloids or on television, I’d filed it away in the anonymous pubescent boy-band person compartment of my brain, along with some vague thoughts that he had way too much hair. (Note to over-30-year-olds: shaggy-hair phobia is an incontestable sign that you are headed for Victor Meldrew territory.) But before interviewing Swift, word spread among the under-thirtysomethings in my life: “You are going to ask her about Harry, aren’t you?” they said scornfully, and when I replied, nonchalantly, that I had no idea who he was, they stood over me until I’d typed his name into Google and acknowledged that the mop-headed 15-year-old nonentity is in fact 19, the lead singer of the Simon Cowell vehicle One Direction, a fully formed international heart-throb with enviable “bastard” pop-star status whose band is always in the process of trying to elbow Swift off her No 1 spot in the charts. Mop-head, it turns out, is also the only recently extinguished former flame of Taylor Swift.

I slowly began to grasp that “Taylor” and “Harry” (the young no longer bother with surnames) form something of an elite in the new world order, along with the cast of Made in Chelsea and Justin Bieber’s worrying new hairstyle. There are blogs so full of Taylor/Harry gossip at the time of the break-up – the once happy couple seemed to have split up in the Caribbean over Christmas, with Styles finding solace in a hot tub on Sir Richard Branson’s private island while Swift was (supposedly) covertly photographed looking lonely and abandoned on a luxury yacht – it is a wonder they had anything to blog about before this ill-fated union. The entire universe seemed to want to get the lowdown on the split, as well as “deets” (details) on any movement in Swift’s dating activity.

The day before I met her, she had performed at the Brits, ripping off a wedding dress mid-song to reveal an untried and untested combo of – tutted and slavered the press – “revealing” long-sleeved T-shirt, knee-high boots and shorts. (Swift has been very famous since she was 16, when she used to wear cowboy boots and gingham.) Anyway. The song she performed, an autobiographical smash hit about a relationship fall-out between our first-person narrator and a “mystery” ex, is called I Knew You Were Trouble. It is extremely catchy in the same way as her previous hit We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together (also about a mystery ex). The lyrics to Trouble include the killer line: “You never loved me or her, or anyone, or anything,” which rather juicily implies a cold-hearted soul of the sort Swift’s teenage female fans will identify with as they mournfully listen to it over and over again in their bedrooms. (P.S. I love it, too.) “Who is Trouble about?” I asked the under-30-year-olds. Collectively, they rolled their eyes (#howcanshebeajournalistandnotknowthis). “It’s so like obviously about Harry Styles.” That afternoon, Swift’s PR rang me to say that Swift loves antiques and cooking, but was not going to talk about her ex-boyfriends.

Much as we would like to move directly on to thoughts about her best-selling album Red (five million copies sold so far, and rising), we must return to the Brits for one moment, while it is still fresh in our minds. I have a weakness for catchy pop songs. I love I Knew You Were Trouble. Taylor:

“Thank you! Oh, my God, thank you so much.” She explains what was running through her head during her performance: “ ‘OK, made it down the stairs, didn’t trip. OK. Next move. Walk back upstage, keep your shoulders back. All right. And then… you turn.’ And at the same time, you’re balancing the analytical side of your brain, which is telling you where to go and how to go there, with the other side of your brain, which is saying, ‘Feel everything you’re singing and show it on your face. Feel everything exactly as you felt it when you wrote the song.’ ”

That sounds complicated, I say, especially if your ex-boyfriend is sitting there watching you.

To recap: while Swift sang, a million cameras homed in on Styles’s face. “A new notch in your belt is all I’ll ever be,” Swift belted out; Styles’s face remained studiously care-free. I tell her I think I would die if I had to perform in front of my ex-boyfriend.

“Well,” she says, “it’s not hard to access that emotion when the person the song is directed at is standing by the side of the stage watching.” In retrospect, it is definitely one of her favourite performances, and she is particularly happy to have pulled it off at the Brits (her first time). She was “stoked”.

[…]

Items three and four on the did-she-or-didn’t-she gossip list: what about the rumour that she’s shooting her new video wearing exactly the same beanie as Harry Styles likes to wear? “I just like to wear a hat sometimes,” she smiles rather conspiratorially. “I mean, sometimes I do things symbolically, as a dig. Other times, I’m just wearing a hat.” Last year, she sang Never, Ever… (“So he calls me up and he’s like, ‘I still love you’ and I’m like, ‘This is exhausting’ ”) at the Grammys and burst into a British accent – mimicking Harry Styles, it was rumoured. I thought it was wonderful. Swift allows herself an infectious guffaw, finally to be asked about this much blogged-about prank: