text: Taylor Swift and rumored boyfriend Calvin Harris spotted together after watching the band HAIM perform at Troubadour Club in West Hollywood . Were a record company to write a job description for the next big thing in popular music, certain attributes would surely be high on the list. Foremost among them, one suspects, would be a decent singing voice, the ability to dance and that elusive brand of charisma which draws crowds of infatuated fans. None of which Calvin Harris possesses. Not that he will be the slightest bit concerned about it. Because he has plenty of reasons for self-confidence. Seventy million of them, in fact. That is the fortune the 31-year-old pop leviathan has amassed since bursting onto the scene eight years ago. No mean feat for an introspective and, by his own admission, curmudgeonly son of a biochemist from the Scottish Borders who less than a decade ago was stacking supermarket shelves to make ends meet. To put it into perspective, his £70 million nest egg eclipses the fortunes of household names such as Kylie Minogue and Sir Cliff Richard. Yet walk into your local pub and it’s a fair bet many people, unless they follow the charts, will never have heard of him. So how has a pasty-faced, gangly geek (he’s 6ft 5in), who decided early in his career to eschew personal publicity altogether, turned into the biggest pop star in Britain? The numbers don’t lie. His earning power is nothing short of breathtaking. Last year alone he earned £45 million. For one night’s work DJ-ing at a party in Puerto Rico, he was reportedly paid $1million. The year before he grossed £30 million, making him comfortably the best paid DJ on the planet, and in the same year his credibility was bolstered by an Ivor Novello award for songwriter of the year. All of this has led to him being named the 21st most powerful celebrity on Forbes magazine’s Celebrity 100, beating the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Simon Cowell and even J.K. Rowling. But the very word ‘celebrity’ flies in the face of everything Calvin Harris stands for. Fans of The X Factor might remember the occasion, in 2009, when the Scot invaded the show’s stage during a performance by the lovably hopeless Irish twins, Jedward. Holding a pineapple on his head, he bent over and pointed at his buttocks — a bizarre performance which he later explained was a protest against the ‘frightening stranglehold that Simon Cowell has got over the entire music chart in the UK at the moment’. Protesting about The X Factor’s obsession with fame, he declared: ‘I’m not a celebrity. I make music.’ This underdog mentality undoubtedly stems from his background. He was born Adam Wiles in 1984 in Dumfries. His father, David, now 72, was the lead biochemist at the local hospital and his mother, Pamela, 65, had been an occupational therapist but became a full-time housewife after Adam was born. DJ Calvin Harris performs onstage in East Rutherford, New Jersey. In 2008 he stormed the stage at an X Factor stage performance to protest what he called the programme's obsession with fame . Two older siblings went on to become, respectively, an IT expert and a marketing executive. Adam, however, was cut from a different cloth. As a teenager, he underwent a dance music epiphany while listening to the radio in his bedroom. But instead of heading out to pursue the rock’n’roll cliche in pubs and clubs, the cerebral young man shut himself in his bedroom, where he built his own studio and spent the next eight years honing the production skills which would make his fortune. Soon his music making had become an obsession. He has said that he so rarely left his room that he experienced a personality change, becoming an anti-social electronic music geek, chained to a keyboard. Calvin Harris at the 2013 Ivor Novello awards held at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London . There were stints in bands, but he made an awkward frontman, perpetually hiding behind an oversized pair of sunglasses and resolutely refusing to dance. Nobody was surprised when he gave that up. There were some encouraging signs. An independent record label released a couple of his tunes on vinyl. But he earned more money from the job he took in a fish factory, as well as shelf stacking at Marks & Spencer and Safeway. In 2003, he took a leap of faith and moved to London in an attempt to ‘make it’. He didn’t, and was soon returning north with his tail between his legs. It was back in his bedroom studio that he recorded his first album, I Created Disco, by which time he had rechristened himself Calvin Harris. His salvation, as with so many recent stars, came in the form of social media. Calvin rapidly built a following for his music on MySpace, which brought him to the attention of EMI publishing and later the Sony BMG label. In the blink of an eye he was writing two of the tracks on Kylie Minogue’s comeback album, X. That same year, 2007, he released his debut album, which went gold with more than 100,000 sales. Almost by accident, Calvin had found the solution to his problems: get somebody else, better looking, more famous and with a better voice, to sing his songs instead. So after I Created Disco, he packed up singing and retreated, gratefully, into the background. Since that first collaboration he has worked with anyone and everyone in the business, from popstars Rihanna (their 2011 smash hit We Found Love won him a Grammy) and Katy Perry to the British superstar Ellie Goulding. Even Cheryl Cole owes her biggest hit to Calvin. Along the way, he has released three more albums, all of which have been global smashes. Two years ago, he surpassed Michael Jackson to become the first artist to score nine top-ten hits from a single album. After his I Created Disco album (pictured), he packed up singing and retreated, gratefully, into the background . With such dizzying success it is impossible to keep a low profile for ever, and even Calvin has been affected by the fame juggernaut. It began with a sequence of beautiful girlfriends. Despite his ungainly appearance, he found himself squiring the Russian-American swimwear model Anne Vyalitsyna. Soon he was developing a reputation for becoming involved with his collaborators. Ellie Goulding was an on-off dalliance for years, and he had a year-long relationship with singer Rita Ora, which ended with a Twitter argument. And while success had built Calvin’s confidence, it did nothing to dampen his contrary nature. Twitter spats (he has 5.79 million followers) have become his stock in trade. He has railed at unkind reviewers, ‘rich kids’ ruining the record industry, his tracks being sold for what he regards as derisory prices, and singers whom, he feels, do not treat his creations with sufficient respect. Calvin Harris had made a career working with some of the hottest stars in pop music, including Ellie Goulding (left) and Rihanna (right) All of which paints a less than complimentary picture of a petulant star whose life has changed beyond recognition. Earlier this year, he jettisoned another stunning model, the American Aarika Wolf, in favour of the biggest prize of his dating career, American pop princess Taylor Swift. Miss Swift, a 25-year-old global star who had the top-selling album of 2014 in the U.S., fits the 2015 vintage Calvin to perfection — for since 2013 he’s gone about reinventing himself from the ground up. No longer a the anorak-loving teenager from Dumfries, Harris owns an £11 million mansion in Beverly Hills . That was the year he signed a deal to DJ at the American superclub Hakkasan, taking up a residency in Las Vegas and buying an £11 million mansion in Beverly Hills. In less than a decade he has gone from a nondescript detached house on the Georgetown housing estate just outside Dumfries, to a mansion with ten bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, two swimming pools and a guesthouse so palatial it comes with its own private garage. Such is his earning power, however, this is a drop in the ocean. Last year, he became the first artist to have his music streamed over a billion times on the internet and, at the rate he is going, the DJ will have £250 million in the bank before he hits 40. The Hakkasan gig alone earns him £200,000 a night, while he has been paid many millions more by brands who use his music in advertising campaigns. He has physically changed beyond recognition as well. His once pasty skin is tanned, while endless gym sessions have honed those spindly limbs to lean, muscled perfection. The chest is waxed, the hair and designer stubble coiffed daily by a personal groomer, the teeth whitened and straightened and his wardrobe overhauled by a stylist. The end result of all this has been a contract as the face and body of Emporio Armani. No longer the self-conscious wallflower, he now poses in nothing but a pair of briefs without missing a beat. He became the biggest thing in music by stealth, but the days of Calvin Harris flying under the radar are a thing of the past.
target: Icon has amassed £77million fortune since rise to fame eight years ago .
  Former Dumfries shelf-stacker now owns £11 million Beverly Hills mansion .
  Ivor Novello winning DJ has worked with the brightest stars in pop music .