Payne and suffering as ‘old man’ of One Direction goes too soon
It’s hard to appreciate a cyclone while you’re standing in the eye of it. Only in hindsight did Liam Payne — dead in shocking circumstances at just 31 — begin to come to terms with what he had been through.
News of the sudden, tragic death of British singer-songwriter Liam Payne will be felt most deeply by a generation of fans who grew up in an era when One Direction was, for a time, the biggest name in pop music.
The heights of fervent popularity they reached was akin to 2010s Beatlemania: picture 15,000 fans camped outside the boy band’s hotel in Lima, Peru, hoping for a glimpse at their pin-up heroes, and you’re partway there to understanding how deep and meaningful that connection was for millions of young listeners around the world.
Payne died in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Thursday morning, Australian time, in an apparent accident after falling from the third storey of a hotel at a height of about 13m. First responders were unable to resuscitate him, such was the severity of his spinal injury.
Alongside One Direction bandmates Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik, Payne first appeared on British television contest The X Factor in 2010, when they were each aged between 16 and 19.
The buzz surrounding them soon became an electrical storm, as the clean-cut group was sucked into the music industry machinery and sent to No. 1 with a bullet on Sony Music UK’s list of artistic priorities – a directive which was soon repeated across practically every territory on the planet.
The British/Irish group’s debut album, 2011’s Up All Night, reached No. 1 in the US and Australia, as well as No. 2 in Britain.
“At the start we couldn’t get past our own egos,” Payne told The Guardian in 2019. “Everybody had their own little thing – it was like having four older brothers.”
But it was the group’s 2012 follow-up album, Take Me Home, which launched it into pop’s rarest air by topping charts in those three countries, and 32 others beside.
Across five albums and four headlining world tours, Payne and co reached a new generation of music fans by becoming the Gen Z equivalent of Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync, the two acts who duelled for pop supremacy during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
As the more experienced performer of the quintet, Payne was initially called upon by management to keep the other four members in line as their collective star ascended.
“I was like, that’s great, innit – because then everyone in the band thinks I’m a dick,” he said in 2019. Recalling one of its first hotel stays while on tour, he said, “We’ve got plates being thrown out the window, mattresses being ridden down the stairs, and I’m getting calls from the manager saying: ‘You need to sort it out’.”
That compact established a perception among fans that he was the comparatively boring ‘straight man’ to heart-throbs such as Styles and Malik.
In a familiar story to pop and rock acts since time immemorial, Payne began to give the hotel room minibar a solid workout as a coping mechanism while living life on the road, veering between stupendous highs and hours of tedium soaked in booze.
It’s hard to appreciate a cyclone while you’re standing in the eye of it, and it was only in hindsight that Payne began to come to terms with what he and his bandmates had been through.
“It’s like the kids just lost their minds,” he said in 2019. “There were parts of it that were a bit shit, like there is with anything, and there were parts of it that was just euphoria.”
After Malik left in 2015, the remaining One Direction members opted for ‘indefinite hiatus’: its final run of performances that year included about 100 appearances across the world, including seven sold-out Australian stadium shows in February 2015.
Following the group’s conclusion, Payne later spoke of undergoing two years of therapy. His son Bear was born in 2017 to former X Factor judge Cheryl Cole, and unlike his former bandmates – most notably stadium-filling megastar Styles – his solo career never really took off, although his 2017 debut single Strip That Down has since clocked more than 1b streams on Spotify alone.
For a generation who thrilled to One Direction’s albums and concerts, his death at 31 has been met with a wave of grief on TikTok, Instagram and beyond.
As is tradition, news of his death has sent current and formers fans into a time warp, as they reflect on those few golden years where, for a time, Payne and his bandmates strode the pop world as kings, with daylight second and only the sky above them.
Given the pressure cooker environment in which those five boys met and became global superstars – then young men – together, it’s tough to imagine the acute pain that Styles, Malik, Tomlinson and Horan will be feeling today.
Regardless of one’s interest in their music, a relatively young father dying with much of his life still ahead of him is a tragedy by any measure.
Bonded as boy band brothers, five have now become four. With his loss, One Direction’s indefinite hiatus is likely to remain in place forever more.
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