Liam Payne and the ‘manic merry-go-round’ of teenage fame
The late One Direction star opened up about the pressures of social media and the price of global superstardom.
When I spoke to Liam Payne at the end of 2019, when he was 26, I found a shy, slightly nervous person who must have done hundreds of interviews in his short life and probably hadn’t enjoyed many of them.
But this Wolverhampton lad, the son of a nurse and a fitter in an aerospace factory, struck me as a gentle, thoughtful and self-aware young man, albeit not one entirely at ease with his life.
We were there to discuss a television program he had made for Sky, Ant Middleton & Liam Payne: Straight Talking, in which he took a three-day road trip in remote Namibia with the former special forces hardman.
He surfed trains and slept beside an open fire with lions prowling around. The underlying purpose was to use this ultimate exercise in male bonding to allow Payne to speak from the heart about his extraordinary and, yes, troubled life.
After a slightly stilted start, his talks with Middleton were revealing, with Payne reflecting on the perils of fame, being a father and his two-year relationship with Cheryl Cole, which ended in 2017.
At the time they were separated and sharing the care for their son, Bear, who was then nearly two. One Direction, which formed in 2010 when Payne was a teenager and went on to sell more than 50 million records, had been dormant since 2016 but he had enjoyed success as a solo singer.
His personal life seemed to be on a more even keel, with him telling Middleton that the mother of his son was “still the most important person” in his life despite the split.
In the program Payne also intimated that he had been to a dark place, implying that he had suicidal thoughts.
“For some certain circumstances I’m quite lucky to be here still,” he said. He also told an extraordinary story about a fire in his home when he was a teenager. He was injured, didn’t know if his friend would survive, but a policeman still asked him for his autograph.
When we spoke the experience felt akin to talking to a shy, sweet-spirited relative without any of the overly media-trained arrogance that often comes with someone with his level of fame. He was impossible to dislike, prompting in me paternal feelings but also a certain level of disquiet.
The stardom he had enjoyed in those short intense years of The X Factor and One Direction clearly had considerable downsides.
While this may sound terribly pretentious, I ended our chat thinking of Thomas Hardy’s poem about disillusionment, Shut Out That Moon, which concludes with the lines: “Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom,/ Too tart the fruit it brought.”
He told me that the main thing he gained from his experience with Middleton was a few days away from the hurly-burly of his usual life. He enjoyed the campfire chats and said that it “was the moments when we didn’t speak that changed my life for ever, when I learnt the true power of conversation – and silence.
“My life is different to many people and I am not looking for any special sympathy,” he said. “I have an interesting life, even if there is a price to pay for the fame with the attention you get, as I have with my incredible experiences on The X Factor and in One Direction.”
He was clear on the way people like him were pushed into “a world dominated by the demands of social media and we live in a world of constant chatter.
“The pressures in Britain of social media fill our lives with charts and numbers and figures, people obsessed with how a page is doing, how a tweet has performed, which is stupid really. Because none of it is real. People, especially young people, don’t get enough of these simpler things in life.
“When I was in remote Africa there was no phone signal and no clouds in the sky, so no light pollution. We were making fires, and chatting was our only entertainment.
“When you’re able to sit in silence with somebody and not have to fill it, that’s when you know you’ve got a true friend, a true relationship with somebody,” he said, calling on young people to temper their engagement with social media.
“We just need everything much quicker these days. It lessens the slowing down thing of life, everything so uptight and fast-paced, which is hard and makes life difficult. But when you slow down and shut up, you finally notice the world around you.”
In the intervening years his life took some dark turns. Speaking on the Diary of a CEO podcast in 2021, Payne told its host, Steven Bartlett, that he had struggled with “severe suicidal thoughts” and drug use while he was in One Direction.
“I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be,” he told Bartlett. “Where’s rock bottom for me? And you would never have seen it. I’m very good at hiding it. No one would ever have seen it.”
In July last year he revealed that he had just spent more than three months in a rehabilitation facility in Louisiana, being treated for his struggles with alcohol.
It was also reported that his former fiancee, Maya Henry, a model from Texas, issued a cease and desist letter last week because of angry messages he left her after their split in May 2022. It was claimed the singer continuously contacted her friends and family, including her mother.
Recent phone footage of him attending his One Direction bandmate Niall Horan’s concert in Argentina, which showed him dancing animatedly, had gone viral on social media just days before his death.
He was on holiday in the country with his American girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, an influencer, who had flown home to the US two days before he died. He hadn’t exactly been inactive on social media in recent months, but his postings certainly didn’t seem obsessive.
“We’re so much more interested in what everybody else is doing, we’re forgetting to just be ourselves. I recommend everyone puts their phone down, stops for a few minutes every day and you’ll find you’re not even looking at your phone that much or checking on what everybody else is doing,” he told me.
“Because if you get wrapped up in this manic merry-go-round and in everybody else’s problems you forget to deal with your own. And you fail to see the bigger picture.”
The Times
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