Calvin Harris: The Dweeb That Once Was

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Calvin Harris: The Dweeb That Once Was

How an oddball indie-rave, bedroom producer, became the biggest (and sexiest) DJ in the world.

Calvin Harris has never left my life. Since I was 15 and I Created Disco came out we have grown together, navigating the trials of love, loss, work and recreation. Collecting bruises as we learnt to negotiate the world, our skins toughening in unison. In recent weeks, following a slew of news including biography announcements, record-breaking wealth and his love life, I have been forced once again to consider the man from Dumfries, the man I used to know. In short, asking myself one question: how did an oddball indie-rave bedroom producer, with a penchant for home-made Youtube sketches, become the biggest (and sexiest) DJ in the world?

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I remember, all those years ago, going to see him in a Carling Academy. I wore glow-stick glasses. He wore a polyester windbreaker. Yet eight years later, I barely recognise him. While I have become a slightly better dressed, but gaunter shadow of my greasy grinning youthful self, he has ascended. He is a God. An Armani clad Adonis. A Las Vegas selector. The highest earning DJ in the world. Underwear model. Record breaking hit maker. Taylor Swift's boyfriend.

If Drake thinks he started from the bottom he has no idea. This is more than a success story, this is a Cinderella story. Calvin Harris didn't just make it, he went way beyond. What has he traded in for this glory? I can only assume, somewhere in his Beverly Hills mansion, there is a portrait of the dweeb from Dumfries, harbouring the gawkiness he has so easily shed. When he hosts parties, he must beg Rihanna – "No, don't go in there, it's private, please, just go downstairs, have another goblet of the Louis XII cognac."

It was announced this week that in October Harris will have a biography released, titled Calvin Harris: The $100 Million DJ. It will be 256 pages long and will chart the journey he has taken from stacking shelves in a supermarket – cripplingly shy and barely sure if his music career would ever take off – to breaking Michael Jackson's record for the most hits from a single album. It feels appropriate that his story will be told. After all, it is a remarkable trajectory. It can be difficult to remind ourselves of his first incarnation now, but the reality is there was a time when Preston from the Ordinary Boys was cooler than Calvin Harris. An era when he was an outsider, a weirdo bedroom producer making vaguely retro-fitted pop songs for the indie-rave generation. Back then, his contemporaries were Hadouken and Klaxons, not Hardwell and Kaskade.

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If any single track could be taken as the blueprint of his evolution, it would be "I'm Not Alone". The initial 45 seconds of the song could have been Calvin as he was, with his wobbly singing voice, like a nervy teenager auditioning for the school musical. Then a drop, straight out of Guetta's garrison, a shot of EDM-tastic grandeur, synths that actually sound like a camera crane panning over a throbbing festival crowd. It was possibly this moment, in this track that the tides turned. The plodding, homely, crunchy basslines were gone. We should have seen the signs then that he was elevating to a higher place. A place that we, with our rainy nights out in sticky clubs and crammed house parties, could never reach. Don't get me wrong, I'm not condemning Calvin Harris as a sell out – he wasn't exactly Elliott Smith in the first place – yet for a DJ now placed at the forefront of America's EDM industry, it is striking that he used to sing live and shake maracas at T4 on the Beach.

Now he is one of the richest British musicians in the world. He is richer than Gary Barlow and Chris Martin. He is richer than Cliff Richard. They must be confounded. Cliff must be pummelling tennis balls sky high in anguish. "Who is Calvin Harris?" he is crying. The definition of superstar has changed now, it includes DJs and producers, placing their voiceless names on tracks and guaranteeing their million-selling status. In joining these ranks, in becoming the Calvin Harris of today, he has not evolved from his former self, he has killed him completely. Rejecting his stuttered vocal performances for high-profile features and production credits. A far cry from those years ago, when he sang to me through headphones on the bus to school, rain trickling in past the badly sealed steamed windows: "Merrymaking, drug-taking, at my place baby…at my place."

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He met Taylor Swift's cats the other day, his Instagram post describing it as "a moment". Apparently he's had to tell Harry Styles to back off as well. Styles and Swift had been hooking up shortly before she got together with Harris. The gossip columns say he's told him to "stay the fuck away". Then again, another website is suggesting he cheated on his previous girlfriend with Swift. I tried to get Tinder to work again last night but I'd run out of 3G for the month.

How did you get there Calvin? I know you are a hit-maker of unprecedented proportions, but that doesn't account for how sharply everything happened. I remember when news first broke that he was working with Kylie. We were so excited for him. She must have heard "The Girls" and liked it. "Who'd have thought? Little Calvin Harris working with Kylie Minogue!" How naive we all were. And do you remember the time he stage-crashed Jedward during the X-Factor? He had a pineapple on his head and he wiggled his bum at the camera. He later apologised on Twitter and Louis Walsh said he didn't know who Calvin Harris even was. They were simpler times.

We didn't know what was to come. 18 Months – the first album in history to feature nine top ten singles. "We Found Love" ringing in my ears, I struggled to recognise what he was becoming. It was as though, somewhere between watching videos of Harris trying to open packets of shortbread on Youtube, I had turned around and he had gone. Changed forever. The boy had become a man, now the man was working with Ne-Yo. Don't mistake my intentions Calvin. I am happy for you. I hope you are happy too. I'm sure you are as surprised as any of us. I shouldn't think, when you were tirelessly poring over those Ting Tings remixes, you could have foreseen the crowds of thousands, the millions upon millions of dollars, the fitness regimes, the never ending summer.

At what cost though Calvin? Where are the fish eye glasses now? Are they buried in a dusty shoe box marked 2007? You are a behemoth, one of the most powerful musicians in the world. You could headline anywhere and work with anyone. But at what cost? Your bank balance is healthy, but can the same be said of your soul? Part of me wonders, with all the number ones and celebrity dates, is there still the ghost of a stubbled, hidden nerd? Shuffling around the stage of a Carling Academy. Wearing Topman boxers. Repeating your lost mantra, "it was acceptable in the 80s."

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