16 Reasons One Direction Are on Top of the Stadium Rock Game

6. Harry announces, “You’re lovely to be in here. We can see you at the top. We can see you up in the back. You’re a beautiful, beautiful bunch of people.” So much of 1D’s brilliance is convincing everyone they can see the crowd, despite all the glaring lights in their faces. The key line in their new smash “Drag Me Down”: “All these lights can’t blind me.”

7. The screaming is like two and a half hours inside a jet engine, but in a good way. Loudest moment: The climactic shriek in “Midnight Memories.” Runner up: when the video screen show’s Harry’s boots.

8. Harry’s twirl game explodes in the second chorus of “No Control” — he romps off to his corner and spins in circles. He’s not singing, he’s not up on the video screen, just going into his happy place. During “Diana,” he went for a sprint down the catwalk and back, for no reason. Dude’s been on his feet 90 minutes at this point.

It’s like watching the footage of Secretariat running the Belmont Stakes in 1973 — he’s 31 lengths ahead of the other horses, but he speeds up madly for the final stretch because he’s so in love with being fast. That’s what it’s like watching Harry work a stadium. You instinctively think, “Dude, save some for later,” but the whole physiology of saving some for later is alien to the Harry lifeform. The harder he works to give every drop of his Harry-osity away, the more of it he has. Watching Harry spit water and touch his hair makes me want to be a better person.

9. Speaking of twirling, we know from the gossip columns that Harry is a hardcore Stevie Nicks fan — he even baked her a birthday cake. Why haven’t we seen pictures of this cake?

10. These boys love the whole 1970s rock thing — they call this tour On the Road Again, which should be the name of a double-vinyl live album from a 1974-era Southern AOR sextet who sing about rockin’ down the highway. The tour program has the size and heft of an LP, full of Time Fades Away–style black-and-white pics of boys near amps. The classic-rock-as-teen-pop thing is so avant-garde, the rest of the music world still hasn’t found a way to imitate it. Their Fleetwood Mac homage “Fireproof” even nails the precise John McVie bass throb.