I would be surprised if his next tour included arenas: Louis Tomlinson at Wembley reviewed

You don’t need to be a historian of pop to realise that having been part of a huge manufactured group is no guarantee of subsequent success. Most boy and girl band stars, after a brief flurry of passion, are forced to descend into the netherworld of panto, reality TV, and ever-diminishing returns from the actual music. The problem seems to be that the wider world doesn’t have the mental space to accept three, four or five people competing for attention. In almost every case, the wider world can only be bothered to embrace one person after the split, and it’s not always the one you expect.

Gary Barlow – the talent! – was meant to be the solo star from Take That; it turned out to be Robbie Williams. Nadine Coyle was the one who could sing in Girls Aloud, but Cheryl Tweedy got the career. Victoria Beckham dominated the post-Spice narrative, and she barely even bothered with music. Louis Tomlinson was part of the biggest boy band of them all, One Direction, so he has enough traction to just about fill Wembley Arena, but the post-1D star is clearly Harry Styles, now anointed as the dress-wearing, Shania Twain-duetting, think-piece-provoking king of pop, all things to all men, women and non-binary people.

Tomlinson decided, instead, to be ‘the indie rock one’ of the split (a role previously fulfilled by Mark Owen after Take That and Mel C after the Spice Girls). Even before he started singing you could see who his role models were: he ambled onstage to screams (the audience was almost entirely female, and very young), wearing a vintage England away shirt and Adidas trainers, rolling his shoulders like Liam Gallagher. The music, by and large, cleaved to that model – Tomlinson’s solo album, Walls, is fundamentally Britpop after the fact – and it was all very amiable, though it was a little startling how much more interestingly constructed the old 1D song ‘Little Black Dress’ was – and it wasn’t even a single – than anything from Walls.