In these times of see-sawing uncertainty, I want our celebrities to play to type. It gives me comfort and stability. I marvelled when Marco Pierre White Jr didn’t attend court to testify in an assault case because he was “too hungover”. I didn’t want Jennifer Aniston to be pregnant as much as she didn’t want to be pregnant. And when Brooklyn Beckham’s photography for Burberry was slated as anodyne? Perfect. Everything’s going to plan, each famous is giving us service as usual, while British politics provides us with more ins and outs than a season of Love Island set on a Carnage bar crawl on the Magaluf strip.
But then, then, there’s Calvin Harris being a nice guy! And it’s unsettling. You see, Taylor Swift co-wrote a song with Calvin, called This Is What You Came For, featuring Rihanna on vocals. It’s a good song, and it’s got to number one, but on the ranking of famous couples’ creative output, it’s land a lot closer to Mr and Mrs Smith than, say, Eyes Wide Shut. Yet the exes are still tussling over it. Terrified that the Caylor/Talvin-ness of the song would overshadow its majesty, Taylor insisted at the time, her lyrics were handed elsewhere to be sung and her writing credit plopped under the pseudonym Nils Sjoberg. There is, incidentally, a real man called Nils Sjoberg, who lives in Gothenburg and says the whole fall-out is ‘hilarious’. Which makes one person, because, as TMZ reports, Taylor was furious with Calvin, and dumped him after he responded to a question from radio interviewer Ryan Seacrest about ever collaborating with Taylor with: ‘You know, we haven't even spoken about it. I can't see it happening though.’
Now, Taylor’s team, skirting round all the internet’s rumours about the WASPy nesting of Taylor and Tom Hiddleston’s new relationship like it’s an actual wasps’ nest, decided to instead confirm a relatively piffling scrap of gossip; that Taylor is Nils.
People magazine published a story, headed: ‘Taylor Swift wrote Calvin Harris and Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For’, rep confirms’ and Calvin’s response? That creepy, seedy niceness of his.
At least at the beginning of his 6-tweet tirade, where he mentioned Taylor’s vocals made it into the final track and praised the way she ‘smashed it as usual’. But then, then, it descended, into Calvin positioning himself as the bigger guy: ‘Hurtful to me at this point that her and her team would go so far out of their way to try and make ME look bad at this stage though’, he quipped. He then added: ‘I figure if you're happy in your new relationship you should focus on that instead of trying to tear your ex bf down for something to do’ before placing himself as a victim of Taylor’s seeming habit of scapegoating other celebrities for attention: ‘I know you're off tour and you need someone new to try and bury like Katy [Perry] ETC but I'm not that guy, sorry. I won't allow it’
And then, killing Taylor with kindness, he tweeted: ‘Please focus on the positive aspects of YOUR life because you've earned a great one’
It’s all very sweet. Look, Calvin’s giving props to his ex (who’s already with someone else!) and politely requesting that she not tear him down to build herself up. What a cool guy! What a kind guy! He doesn’t want to be part of Taylor’s games. Except, except, Calvin really isn’t that nice a guy, and he loves playing games, having had excellent form for this exact sort of spat. Time hop yourself back to August 2014, if you will. Around the same time Taylor was performing Shake It Off at the VMA’s, Rita Ora was due to sing her single,* I Will Never Let You Down*, at the Teen Choice Awards. However, she was blocked from doing so by the person who’d written it and therefore has the power to veto her performing it. Who was this mysterious jobsworth songwriter? None other than Rita’s ex…Calvin Harris! He later tweeted: ‘You'll only know 1 side of the story RE Teen choice awards because I choose not to talk to the papers about every aspect of my personal life…just know I had a damn good reason.’
Instagram: People Magazine
No, we don’t know the reason - and most speculative theories of the real story behind this are too stodgy with putrid misogynist slut-shaming of Rita to be efficiently picked apart - but what we do know is that he really did block his ex from singing his tracks. Nice guy, eh?
Right now, Taylor’s in a position where she too, could block her ex from performing the song she has writing credits on. But she’s not doing that, all she’s doing - from what we can see - is looking to be credited on a song she wrote. Yes, Calvin blocked Rita over a year ago, pop has changed so wildly since then that people actually like Justin Bieber’s music. But he’s never apologised and doesn’t appear to notice the contradiction in his stances on his respective exes.
I’m loathe to defend Taylor - whether it’s real or faked, her relationship with Tom Hiddleston is obnoxious and smug - and where I used to admire her ability to bring together a smorgasbord of random celebrities, like her life’s a series of Live Aid gigs, her squad now reeks of social climbing, a clique that’ll chew up and spit out whoever doesn’t tow the party line. However, when faced with utter hypocrisy from her ex, a bitter person who did much worse to Rita - helping to stall her entire career - than Taylor is now doing to him, I’m afraid I have to stand by her. Maybe there’s more murkiness going on underneath, maybe Taylor’s pulling strings we can’t see, and the whole Tom Hiddleston thing is just a distraction from us seeing the true machinations of her Machiavellian evil. Or, maybe she just wanted a credit on a song she wrote. And perhaps Calvin is a really nice guy, a good guy who - apart from the walk-in massage parlours offering a happy ending - doesn’t want any part of the Hollywood nonsense he’s moved to LA for. He could very well be above the scheming and the plotting that seems to go on within Taylor’s camp. Well, if he really is a nice guy, and above being mean to exes, it’s high time he practiced what he preached. If anything, it’d provide a little consistency from people in the public eye. And that really is what I came for.
You might also be interested in:
Slut-Shaming Taylor Swift Just Undoes All Our Hard Work For Sexual Equality
5 Reasons The Internet Thinks Taylor Swift And Tom Hiddleston Are Staged
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.