It can get scary, admits One Direction star Niall Horan as adulation goes too far on boys’ world tour
THE One Direction boys are getting goosebumps playing to screaming fans in massive stadiums but when the adulation goes too far “it’s not nice to watch”.
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THE screaming hasn’t stopped for three years.
It takes a break in the early hours of the morning but the second a member of One Direction, their band or anyone in their camp who has ever featured on Google images opens their curtains, the noise rings out.
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Hundreds of hysterical Chilean girls are corralled by police about 100m from the Santiago hotel entrance and their screaming begins at about 7.30am and is still going after midnight despite the fact the band are already on a plane bound for Buenos Aires.
“They must build up their stamina somehow, go to screaming camp or something,” says Louis Tomlinson.
One Direction have chosen to kick off their global stadium tour, called Where We Are for 2014, in South America and their security team have aged about two decades in a week.
At the Santiago hotel, extra bodyguards have been placed in the lifts and on each floor in an attempt to keep the hundreds of fans who have booked in the hotel from finding Tomlinson, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Zayn Malik and Harry Styles.
After show, drinks are attempted in cabanas around the pool and then aborted for a suite on the same floor as their rooms where Horan and Payne enjoy a gathering with their tight-knit crew and most people join in a hysterical, naughty, shouty app version of Celebrity Head.
The tour is only a week in but Payne admits he is already missing one thing.
“Being outside. 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,” he says.
The plus side of being among the world’s biggest pop stars? The band members’ spirits are buoyant when they arrive in Chile because Styles and Payne enjoyed an escape to the revered Inca site Machu Picchu while the rest of the group headed to Jamaica.
Without any fans even knowing until they posted shots on Instagram.
“I really didn’t know what it was before we got there and did some research but when you get there and see how beautiful it is, feel the serenity of the mountains, it beats any photo. That was a good day,” Payne says.
In just three years, One Direction have gone from individual contestants on a television talent quest to Britain’s richest boy band, selling tens of millions of albums and singles globally.
More remarkably, considering concert tickets make you the big bucks these days rather than sales of recorded music, they have gone from sold-out theatres in front of about 5000 adoring teens and tweens to massive sports stadiums which hold more than 50,000 fans.
In 2012 they performed a handful of shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane under the Up All Night tour banner. Last year for the Take Me Home world tour, which was opened by homegrown heroes 5 Seconds Of Summer, they sold out 26 arena concerts nationally and played for more than 300,000 fans.
They will open the On The Road Again tour in February 2015 with five stadium extravaganzas, which should average more than 40,000 fans per gig.
Stepping on to the stage is a trip in itself. While Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Taylor Swift and headlining festival bands know just what it feels like to see and hear that many people react to your physical presence on the world’s biggest stages, the 1D lads admit it is an overwhelming experience.
Payne said he spent the hours before the first show in Bogota “twitching” with excitement. Horan said he had the biggest case of goosebumps in a career full of goosebump moments.
“We had rehearsed in that stadium the day before so you knew it was massive. But it was empty,” he says.
“I remember walking up the stairs with my head down and then looking up to see 50,000 flashes in front of us. There were a lot of glowsticks! Every hair stood up on my arms, it was unbelievable, an unbelievable feeling.”
The production, lights and videos are all bigger. Yet the band members themselves seem more relaxed, even loose, in this larger-than-life environment.
“Are you saying we’re sloppy, are you saying we’re rough, unrehearsed? Is that what you are saying?” Styles asks, joking.
Their advisers have helped coach them on some tricks of the stadium trade but a few shows in, they are still mastering their moves and you can hear one of the lads apologise over his mic to their team when they mess up an exit at the second Santiago concert.
“If you are on an arena stage, you can stand still for a minute if you want to and just be there,” Styles says.
“You are very conscious that in a stadium if you are not moving, you are just not there.”
Graduating to stadiums also demands that the 1D members become experts at crowd control, not a skill most musicians would list under the attributes required to perform a concert.
At the early South American shows, dozens of girls were fainting and hauled out of the crowds after spending hours in the heat without water, waiting for the gates to open.
Then they spent another few hours waiting for the concert and by the time they had whipped themselves into screaming hyperventilation within the first few songs, they were out for the count.
Horan finds those scenes distressing.
“It can get scary for us to keep on performing while you are watching a girl get pulled out of the front row and carried out. It’s not nice to watch. You just want to tell them to relax, we are going to be here for the next hour and a half,” he says.
Reaching the stadium level of success has confirmed One Direction are stretching the limits of the 15 minutes usually granted to the survivors of reality television.
They are already working on the follow-up to third record Midnight Memories which is expected to be released in late 2014.
And Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has just made their year with a complimentary shout out.
“I think One Direction are the biggest band in the world, their songs are great. I’m saying One Direction are brilliant and I’m not kidding,” he told the BBC.
That may be the best thing that has happened to 1D even as their next single You And I looks likely to return them to the top of the world’s charts.
“It’s cool when people of that stature congratulate us or say they are fans of ours. Ronnie Wood came to our movie premiere! Stuff like that humbles you, it’s brilliant,” Horan says.
■ See One Direction at Allianz Stadium in Sydney on February 7, Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane on February 11, Etihad Stadium, Melbourne on February 14, AAMi Stadium, Adelaide on February 17 and Patersons Stadium in Perth on February 20.
Telstra customers will have access to a 48 hour pre-sale from 12pm on May 29, with general tickets will be available from 4pm on May 31.
Originally published as It can get scary, admits One Direction star Niall Horan as adulation goes too far on boys’ world tour
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