Of all the former members of One Direction, Liam Payne best embodied the boy-next-door quality so crucial to their success. Payne – who died aged 31 following a fall from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires – personified the group’s roguish, slightly chaotic charm.
With his great hair and flawless stubble, he had an aura of celebrity – but this was combined with a wide-eyed, bloke-from-down-the street quality that would prove essential as One Direction went from X-factor novelties to a five-headed pop phenomenon that could fill Croke Park.
During and after One Direction, Payne’s career never had much to do with his musical output. After the band went their ways in 2015, he released just one instantly forgettable solo record, LP1. But even the successful ex-1Ders have never entirely relied on their songs – think back to Harry Styles’s 2023 global tour, and what stands out is the enthusiasm of his audience and Styles’s penchant for wearing dresses rather than any actual chart smashes. Hits for One Direction were a consequence of the band’s fame rather than its raison d’être.
As anyone who saw the group live will tell you, on stage, they couldn’t have been more unlike the “classic” boy band. They couldn’t dance – they rarely even attempted to – and their shows were cheerfully anarchic affairs. There was none of the traditional whipping-off of shirts or flashing of toned torsos. Instead, there was lots of random banter – you felt as if you were hanging about with a bunch of pals from school who just so happened to be one of the biggest brands in pop.
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Payne was critical to that approachability. He didn’t have the luminescent charisma that would propel Styles and Niall Horan to solo success, while it is generally agreed that the line-up’s strongest vocalist was Zayn Malik. But he had an insight into what made One Direction work, and the amiability he projected on stage and off spoke to that understanding. One Direction weren’t pop gods on a pedestal – they were those cheeky chancers you recognised from X Factor, and much of that cheery charm emanated from Payne. He also knew that they had to keep things interesting musically, which is why, alongside Louis Tomlinson and Horan (always with his acoustic guitar), he increasingly took an interest in the band’s music, accumulating co-writing credits on their last few albums.
One Direction were unusual in that they largely avoided the pitfalls that have plagued so many other young pop stars. They kept an eye on the business side of their careers and were aware of the dangers of being ripped off. And while they had their moments of wild living, the members mostly seemed to hold things together even if that was difficult.
“From day one we were very lucky with the people we had,” Horan told me last year when promoting his solo album, The Show. “Obviously our parents hadn’t a clue what was going on either. We were very lucky. Simon [Cowell] and the X Factor had a deal with a management company. People who came off the show would go in there and see what happens to their career. When we got there, it was run by Richard Griffiths and Harry Magee [of Modest! Management]. They had a team in place. They were great people. I’ve never felt in any way vulnerable or anything like that. I always felt we were very well looked after. It’s important at that age.”
He added that with success, he and his bandmates had become more involved in the creative side – a musical curiosity he had shared with Payne. “To start, we were deer in the headlights. Oh, ‘you go to the studio, and you work’. You were figuring it all out. From album two onwards, we were involved everywhere, and we’d figured it all out. We made all the decisions. Early doors, many songs were flying around, with some of the most prominent songwriters at that time. Then, as we got older, we started getting into it. Because all of us had writing in us.”
Those “deer in the headlights” would become some of the biggest pop stars of their generation. Yet not everyone is cut out for that level of exposure, and as news of Payne’s death spread, those with knowledge of the industry wondered whether young artists get enough support to help them cope with fame. One of those who posed that question was Mikey Graham of Boyzone.
“Such tragic news. I think it would be a wise move for record companies to have psychologists on their books from now on in his memory as a duty of care for the vulnerability of their young talent. Fame can be very damaging especially in today’s world,” he wrote on social media. “Lots of money. Nobody to help. Lots of yes people. Nobody honest.”
Payne said in 2021 that he had given up alcohol after overusing it for years in an effort to cope with both fame and mental health struggles. The facts behind his death are yet to emerge fully, but it will forever overshadow memories of One Direction – an unspeakably tragic ending to the story of five cheeky boys who charmed millions.
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