The Night Harry Styles Came To Enmore

At around 1am the night before Harry Styles played the Enmore Theatre, you could hear his fans roar.

It was still 18 hours before the doors to his Sydney show opened, but about 60 dedicated punters were camping out to ensure their spot as close to the barriers as possible. Some of them had arrived as early as Friday, taking their place on the concrete path outside the Enmore and guarding it for the next two days.

On Saturday night — as the Enmore prepared to host a David Bowie tribute show — the fans had been shuffled along to an adjacent street, where they’d folded out chairs, rolled out sleeping bags and pulled portable phone chargers out of their bags.

That camp happened to be set up right outside my house, and I was in bed when the roaring started.

Even through double glazed windows and with earplugs in, I could hear a chorus of teenage girls excitedly cheering. Half convinced Harry Styles himself might have shown up, I got up, peered through the blinds and found the real cause.

Letter by letter, Enmore Theatre staff were putting up the Harry Styles sign. This was, evidently, a big moment.

we are a funny bunch @Harry_Styles pic.twitter.com/NSdp9rYfWB

— bella // ☾✰ (@7eventeenblack) November 25, 2017

If a pack of teenagers sleeping out two nights prior to a show seems manic, that’s by design.

Despite Harry Styles being one of the biggest names in music — the sort you’d expect to play multiple sold-out arena shows — his team had booked him just one gig at the suburban Enmore Theatre, a venue with a capacity of only 2200. It’s all part of the plan to rebrand Harry from the fresh-faced star of stadium-filling pop group One Direction into a classic English rock star and, presumably, to prove that he can still whip up plenty of hysteria as a solo star.

Between this and Harry’s single Melbourne show, only 3700 Australians will get to see Styles on this visit. Strict measures locked scalpers out, no tickets were set aside for media, and there were no brand partnerships. It’s hard to think of a show in recent years that’s been harder to get into.

Which means being one of the lucky few to see Harry Styles is a Very Big Deal, something the campers here are well aware of.

The crowd — which is made up mostly of girls in their late teens, accompanied by the odd chaperoning parent dozing off in a deckchair — don’t shove or bicker. Instead, they bond over their shared once-in-a-lifetime experience. They smile and wave as passers-by take them in with lingering stares, playing on their phones or lying on the ground applying eyeliner to pass the hours.

They chat excitedly with the Enmore’s security staff, enlisting them to take group photos or even roping them in for selfies. They go to lengths not to inconvenience any local residents, offering to move their camp away from the home of anyone not as excited about the impending concert as they are. If Sydney’s sample group is anything to go by, Harry Styles fans are very nice people.

By 9am the next morning, the crowd waiting has swelled to about 300. By midday, the line laps around the block. By 5pm — just over an hour before doors open — the footpaths are overflowing.

It’s the campers who will be first through the doors. The girls who arrived first on Friday developed a numbering system, scrawling a digit in permanent marker on the hand of the first few hundred people to arrive. The idea was to alleviate any confusion about who-got-here-when, and to allow campers to leave for toilet or food breaks without losing their spot.

The Enmore rolled with their system, but some fans took umbrage. Human error meant a few people had ended up with the same number on their hands. Some of those who’d arrived early on Sunday morning were annoyed to find people already there, given the Enmore had sent out an email warning ticketholders that no one would be permitted to line-up prior to 8am the day of the show. (But that email also asked fans to please not throw kiwi fruit onto the stage when Harry played his track ‘Kiwi’, so there was a lot on the agenda.)

But it’s a minor tension in what was, by and large, an extremely positive weekend. 19-year-old Bella, one of the first to arrive at the theatre on Friday, tells me camping really isn’t as bad as you’d think, even if nearby venues stopped letting campers in to pee. “We had so much fun in the line, everyone was so incredibly grateful with out system and organisation, they were so thoughtful towards each other,” she said.

“The question we hear most when camping is ‘is it really worth it?’ For me, it is.”

A few hours later, once it’s all done and dusted, I hear the sounds of crying out outside my window. “He was AMAZING,” a young girl says between sobs.

Soon, the crowds will disperse and the streets will become sleepy once more. But exactly 2200 fans will never forget the night Harry Styles came to Enmore.

—

Katie Cunningham is the Editor of Music Junkee and loved every minute of Harry Styles weekend. She is on Twitter.