Liam Payne drew the short straw in One Direction – now we’ll never know the real him

For One Direction, the cue-card screams of the X Factor studio filled the world. In 2012, they popped out of trapdoors in plumes of smoke onto the Madison Square Garden stage to find they hadn’t just broken America, they’d turned it into a deafening cacophony of shrieking young lust. In 2014, their homecoming trio of shows at Wembley Stadium made Shea Stadium in 1965 sound like the most reverent Barbican recital. Hordes of howling fans crammed the streets outside their New York hotels and besieged every signing session and red-carpet appearance. For six years, these young men were nothing short of seismic.

On the back of 70 million album sales and four US No 1 albums – their fifth, 2015’s Made in the AM, only pipped by Justin Bieber – this fresh-faced five-piece drove international stadiums to scenes of teen mania on some of the highest-grossing tours of all time. Though as openly manufactured as they come, literally put together by an industry committee on TV in 2010, they single-handedly revived and reinvigorated a boyband genre that had been in the doldrums since the days of NSYNC and Westlife, spending six years as the most hysteria-inducing British pop sensation since The Beatles.

All of which makes for a highly pressurised hothouse bubble. Liam Payne – who died yesterday after falling from a third-floor balcony at the CasaSur Hotel in Buenos Aires, aged just 31 – had spoken in 2017 about how the “cabin fever” of being in 1D “sent me a bit awol at one point, if I’m honest. I can remember when there were 10,000 people outside our hotel. We couldn’t go anywhere. It was just gig to hotel, gig to hotel. And you couldn’t sleep, because they’d still be outside.” But when the screaming stops, or even noticeably quietens, the relative silence can fill with even more intrusive and confusing questions.

Within 1D, each member had a personality and place, initially allocated to them by Simon Cowell’s SyCo company (as is standard practice in pop band construction) but roles evolved as the boys’ characters shone through. Harry Styles was the flirty ladies’ man, Zayn Malik the cool, enigmatic bad boy. Niall Horan was the sweetheart, and Louis Tomlinson the cheeky party kid with a heart. Payne, however, was lumbered with the father figure role, seemingly cast as the “sensible” and “responsible” one charged with keeping the band in check. With his slick soulful vocals and ability to help write some of 1D’s edgier tracks (Payne was, after all, a devout Linkin Park fan), his was the unsexy Gary Barlow part that always proves the toughest to sell once the inevitable split arrives – as it did for 1D in 2016.

Though it was uncertain in its direction (he’d try his hand at house production and songwriting following the breakup), it would be unfair indeed to call Payne’s subsequent solo career a flop. Shifting 18 million singles, amassing 3.9 billion streams and having a US Top 10 song with debut single “Strip That Down” (a collaboration with Ed Sheeran and Migos rapper Quavo) over his first three solo years is a phenomenon in anyone’s book. But his only album, 2019’s LP1, failed to match the sales or chart placings of some of his former bandmates, largely due to its struggle to find any defining identity for Payne post-1D. Reviews across the board panned the album for its “genre-ticking anonymity” (The Guardian) and “monotonous club sounds” (ABC News), as Payne and a host of en vogue feature artists (J Balvin, Rita Ora, A Boogie wit da Hoodie) tried on R&B, trap, hip-hop and Timberlake-lite pop to see if any of it fit.

LP1 was undoubtedly a stylistically scattershot record, but Payne made for a sensitive modern loverman – delicate and damaged even in autotuned falsetto – and the variety of the album signified his exploratory nature. It also offered the listener brief glimpses of the real Payne behind the makeup. “You know I used to be in 1D, now I’m out, free/ People want me for one thing, that’s not me,” he sang on “Strip That Down”; “Every time it’s heart meet break, lips meet drink/ Rock meet bottom, to the bottom I sink,” he confessed on “Heart Meet Break”.

In 2023, Payne would claim that his creative control over the record was limited. He promised a second solo album that would be more reflective of his real self. “This time, the scariest part is that every one of these songs is a story from my life,” he told Q Radio, “and they’re really close to me … We’ve rewritten a lot of these songs based off … how I’m feeling as a person.”

The tragedy of losing an artist in their prime is a compound one. The shock and empathy for the young family and friends left behind. But also a less tangible loss, of the music and connection that could have been. That second album would ultimately be shelved after this year’s new single “Teardrops” stalled outside the UK Top 40. A September 2023 UK tour and a proposed documentary on Payne’s life had also been axed. His opportunities to fully reveal himself were dissolving around him and, until any unreleased new material surfaces, fans can only clutch at straws to fathom who Payne really was.

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They might recall the video clips of him annoying Styles in interviews or pulling his trousers down onstage, or wrestling with Malik midway through a performance of “Teenage Kicks” in Denmark circa 2013, remembering his playful side or concluding that he may not always have been the level-headed peacekeeper he’d been packaged as.

They might consider the biting comments he’d made about his former bandmates’ solo careers, claiming on Logan Paul’s YouTube Impaulsive podcast in 2022 that one of them had thrown him “up a wall” during an argument, and declaring “there are many reasons I dislike Zayn”. But they will also remember his heartfelt online apology the following year. “I kind of became somebody who I didn’t really recognise any more,” he said. “A lot of what I said just came from the wrong place. I was so angry at what was going on around me. Instead of taking a look inwards …[at] my own frustrations with my own career and where I landed – I took shots at everybody else and that was wrong.”

He later called that appearance “one of those life-changing moments that saved my life in a way” and admitted to attending rehab in Louisiana to “get my head straight” – the latest in a string of media confessions about his alcohol, addiction and mental health issues. In 2019, he credited Russell Brand with introducing him to AA and spoke on the Diary of a CEO podcast in 2021 about how he fell into alcoholism. “When we were in the band, the best way to secure us, because of how big it got, was to just lock us in a room,” he revealed. “And, of course, what is in the room? A minibar.”

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In May last year, Payne celebrated 100 days sober. “I’m excited about [it],” he said of sobriety. “I don’t need those things any more. Party’s over.” Yet events in the months prior to his death suggested a darker period had descended. Last week, The Sun reported an unnamed source as claiming that Payne was finding things tough in the wake of his manager stepping back earlier in the year. “He was a steady hand for Liam and [Liam] appears to be struggling without his guidance,” the source was quoted as saying. “Things have started to seem slightly erratic, with plans being made before they are cancelled last minute.”

Darker still, Payne’s former partner, model Maya Henry, had recently launched legal action against him, alleging constant harassment of herself and her family from the star. “Ever since we broke up he messages me,” she wrote on TikTok, having issued Payne a cease and desist letter. “[He] will blow up my phone, not only from his phone, it’s always from different phone numbers, too, so I never know where it’s gonna come from.”

Payne will never be able to answer the accusations, and many questions remain so soon after his death. But what we do know is that an artist so driven and ambitious that he took the X Factor judges’ 2008 advice to “come back in two years” will no longer get the chance to push further forward. That a man prepared to admit mistakes and improve himself won’t ever reap the rewards. And that, tragically, an elusive pop identity will never find full focus.