If a quarter of a century of reality TV talent shows has taught us anything, it’s that success in them is seldom a guarantee of lasting fame: more often than not, the celebrity is fleeting, and confined to the country of the show’s origin.
You might have predicted that outcome for One Direction. Simon Cowell claimed to have thrown the band together “in 10 minutes” from solo contestants who had failed to progress any further than the bootcamp stage of the 2010 UK X Factor – despite the fact that one of them, the Wolverhampton-born Liam Payne, had at one stage been tipped to win the series for his initial audition: a version of Cry Me a River. One Direction ended the series in third place, and that, you could have assumed, was that – after all, the stock of the boyband was hopelessly low at the time.
But things didn’t work out that way at all. One Direction ended up being one of the definitive pop bands of their era, shifting 70m records, and becoming the first band in the history of the US Billboard chart to see their first four albums debut at No 1. On the most basic level, they were successful because they were talented, charismatic and good looking and, more importantly, because a little more effort seemed to go into their singles from the off. Their debut, What Makes You Beautiful, was infernally catchy; it addressed their female fans with a charming positivity and was rooted in a glossy take on powerpop rather the standard boyband approach of ballad or pop-R&B. “When we heard it,” Payne noted, “it wasn’t what we expected … so it kind of fitted perfectly.”
If they were clearly never going to get in the pages of Kerrang! magazine, they maintained a distinctly rock-y edge to their sound – 2012’s Live While We’re Young opened with what was fairly obviously a homage to The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, which really wasn’t the kind of thing one expected from a TV talent show band. This presumably must have pleased Payne, a fan of the nu-metallers Linkin Park, who described their 2001 single In The End as one of his all-time favourite songs.
The sound was one of the ways in which Payne and co succeeded in reinventing the boyband, dragging it back from the mum-friendly, middle-of-the-road approach of Westlife and Boyzone to its natural teen-friendly state. They seemed noticeably more characterful and irreverent than their immediate predecessors too: when they covered Wheatus’s Teenage Dirtbag live, Payne sang the song’s female part in a keening falsetto. They also appeared to have a little more agency over their careers than was usual. From the start, Payne seemed particularly keen to establish himself as a songwriter, forming “a little partnership” with his fellow member Louis Tomlinson: he co-wrote songs on all of One Direction’s albums, and by the time of 2014’s Four, his name appeared in the credits of eight of the album’s 12 tracks, including its lead single, Steal My Girl.
But the vastness of their success wasn’t enough to prevent them suffering the usual boyband demise: the departure of one dissatisfied member. The band made a brief attempt to continue without Zayn Malik – Payne stepped in to cover Malik’s high vocals onstage – but then came the inevitable “indefinite hiatus” in 2016. The band’s split seemed to leave Payne unsure what to do next. He had dabbled in producing house tracks to a grudgingly positive response from a suspicious dance press (“surprisingly good”, offered one title). He toyed with the idea of becoming a full-time songwriter. He attracted a succession of impressively high-profile collaborators to his solo career: Quavo of Migos, Pharrell Williams, J Balvin, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, Ed Sheeran, Fred Again.
He also struggled with alcohol, and turmoil in his personal life. His debut album, LP1, was released to largely indifferent or negative reviews and was a commercial disappointment: it didn’t come out until three years after One Direction’s split, by which time the momentum had dissipated. He was discussing a follow-up “with more creative control”, and it’s heartbreaking that he never got the chance to make it – or indeed circle back to rejoin his One Direction bandmates in the reunion that once seemed inevitable.
