One Direction fans gear up for British boy band’s 10th anniversary
One Direction fans will this month celebrate the birth of the British boy band phenomenon a decade ago - and all the while they’ll be hoping for a reunion.
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It was all thanks to a doorknob. Or maybe a patch of carpet or curtain.
The fan army of One Direction was perhaps the first global network of digital detectives, assembling on social media to unearth the whereabouts of Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik in any city on the planet.
The arrival of the British boy band juggernaut coincided with the explosion of Facebook and Twitter, the platforms uniting millions of Directioners in their quest to unearth every tiny detail about The X Factor generated pop phenomenon.
These five young men who had failed to progress beyond the bootcamp stage of the 2010 season were thrown together by acerbic talent scout Simon Cowell and while they only came third in the TV talent quest final, they won the pop lottery.
Since launching with their debut single What Makes You Beautiful and album Up All Night in 2011, they have sold more than 200 million records worldwide, with 21 billion streams across all platforms.
1D have won nearly 200 awards including five consecutive ARIA Awards for Best International Artist between 2012 and 2016 and four No. 1 records.
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Now, as the Directioners gear up to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the formation of their beloved pop princes on July 23, their social media skills are devoted to a barrage of tweets and comments begging for a reunion.
“We’ve barely spoken about it,” Niall Horan recently told Nova radio host Smallzy in May.
And so the Directioners will have to celebrate without the participation of their heroes, revisiting all the photos and videos they snapped during their Australian tours between 2012 and 2016 when the band confirmed they would be putting the band on hold. Indefinitely.
By the time they were making their way to Australia for their first visit in April 2012, the Directioners were highly skilled at analysing online photos and posts for any clue which would get them closer to the Fab Five.
They would click through photos of rooms on hotel websites to find the matching doorknob, carpet or curtain which they spied in the background of a shot posted by one of the group.
And then they would swarm, as they did around the Intercontinental Hotel in Sydney, to scream 24/7 in the direction of the rooms where their idols were trapped.
Those with supportive parents prepared to hand over their credit card even booked rooms to circumvent the security cordon.
Other mums would call into media newsrooms soliciting information on the band’s movements in Sydney and Melbourne on that Up All Night tour and appearance at the Logies.
Malik provoked screeches which tipped the decibel meter into the red when he stood shirtless at the window of his room soon after checking in at the Intercontinental.
“That’s one of the things you can’t get used to and you don’t quite know how to deal with it. You want to give them a hug,” Liam told me when we spent their second day in Australia racing around the city from television studio to radio station in the back of a black van.
Zayn remarked he would like the fans to smile more: “Because that could be the first and last time they get to see you and you want them to make the most of it. To smile and be happy and enjoy the experience.”
Over their regular visits to Australia to attend the ARIA Awards or perform in the country’s biggest arena and then stadiums, the members of 1D and their security entourage were doomed to be outwitted by their fans in the cat-and-mouse game of find the pop star.
Payne and Tomlinson decided they wanted to go surfing at Manly. When they got to the beach, there were just a few locals soaking up the autumn rays.
Within minutes of paddling out, Payne turned around to see more than 400 teenagers recording his amateur attempts to stand up on the board and a television news helicopter circling above.
Yet his boy bandmates Styles and Malik were more successful in finding their tribe during that first tour, sneaking out of the hotel to get on the beers with backpackers and fans at the Scary Canary bar in the city.
And Styles and Horan were also fond of indulging their golf hobby during their tours here, with the pair managing not to be put off their game despite the presence of prying camera lenses during sessions in Adelaide and Perth.
But the intrusions reached break-and-enter and theft level when the band returned to Australia in 2013 on their Take Me Home tour which sold out 26 arena concerts nationally and played for more than 300,000 fans.
Payne took advantage of a couple of days off to book into the Jonah’s boutique hotel on Sydney’s northern beaches and was rudely awakened from a post-swim nap by fans who had snuck into his room via an unlocked sliding door.
He managed to scare them off but not before they souvenired a pair of red Calvin Klein boxer shorts he had left to dry on the balcony.
“Hmmm somebody stole my boxers I’m so embarrassed,” he posted on Twitter.
“So how this happened … I went in the sea in those hotel staff put them outside to dry sum 1 climbed on and stole them just to set the scene.”
When they kicked off the Where We Are tour in 2014, you could sense the bird-in-a-gilded cage reality of their pop stardom was wearing thin on these young men who could never have imagined they would sell tens of millions of albums and singles and sell-out the stadiums which had once belonged to rock supergroups like U2 and Coldplay.
“(I miss) being outside,” Payne told me.
“There are that many fans at the hotel, the cars can’t go anywhere without being followed. I miss going outside quite a lot. It literally is from the plane to the car to the hotel to the venue.”
With the five One Direction members now firmly entrenched in their solo careers, the teen and tween screams have morphed into appreciative cheers, and they now count their pop success in streams rather than CD sales.
They may continue to call their break a “hiatus” – and invoke the “never say never” get out clause, it remains unlikely One Direction will reform and soar again to the dizzying heights of their boy band pop supremacy.
“The band got together in July 2010. It’s (the) 10-year anniversary coming up we were chatting if there was anything we could release,” Horan told Smallzy in May.
“We came to the conclusion there was nothing.”
Originally published as One Direction fans gear up for British boy band’s 10th anniversary
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