When I met Liam Payne five years ago, he was 26 years old and riding high. He was about to release his debut solo album and buoyed by the success of the first single, Strip That Down, which he claimed had outsold any of his former One Direction bandmates’ efforts to date. Photos of Payne in Hugo Boss underwear, his body absurdly built, were inescapable, plastered all over buses and billboards.
It was clear, throughout our interview, that Payne took some satisfaction in all this. Through his six formative years in the X Factor boyband, he had been pegged as the group’s “Mr Vanilla”. Payne told me of feeling manipulated by management to keep the others in check, worsening their relationships and the already immense pressure he was under.
He was clearly relishing his new pin-up status – an explicit rejection of the staid role he had been assigned by 1D fans and management alike – clearly not content to accept the diminishing returns that post-boyband fame tends to offer all but a band’s most dazzling member.
His co-writing credits on Four, 1D’s most mature album, reflected his musical talent and ambitions. After the band broke up, he initially thought to pursue a career as a songwriter, Payne told Billboard in 2017, but felt obliged to at least attempt a solo career: “We had some pretty good opportunities around us. I had to do something.”
The result was Strip That Down: a raunchy club track featuring Migos rapper Quavo, in which Payne crowed about drinking Bacardi and Coke and being finally “free” from 1D. I doubt that anyone grieving Payne today will remember him by it. Though a commercial hit, it was throwaway, trend-chasing filler, without the resonance of Payne’s best work with 1D – the life-affirming exuberance of Steal My Girl, for example, or the almost elegant restraint of Night Changes and Fireproof.
Worst of all, it tried to suggest that this Rolex-flaunting, quasi-rapping, lusty Payne was not just a rejection of his sanitised boyband persona, but the real him. “People want me for one thing, that’s not me / I’m not changing the way that I used to be,” he sang, despite the evidence to the contrary. When we spoke, Payne clearly took the song’s success as a sign he was on the right path. It had been streamed more than 1bn times, he told me proudly: “Everything’s just been really great since.”
But beneath the defiant, bad-boy persona, my impression was of an earnest young man who had not yet found his place in the world – who maybe wasn’t quite sure of who he was. And really, what chance did he get?
Perhaps Payne could have found success and happiness as a behind-the-scenes songwriter. But having experienced that level of fame and adoration, it takes a strong sense of self to recognise when the rewards are not worth the costs, and young people who come of age in the public eye don’t get much chance to develop it.
Not only that: there’s money, even careers, to be made from keeping those young stars on that brutal treadmill, as all the post-1D “opportunities” Payne was presented with go to show. Turning those down would have meant walking away from all that he had been promised, implicitly and explicitly, when he was a teenager and was handed the world on a plate. How many of us, having had a taste of our wildest dreams, would be prepared to say “no more”? Who wants to confront the possibility that they might have peaked in their 20s, when the comeback might be just around the corner?
Now, stars are increasingly speaking about the soul-destroying toll of fame. But 1D were canaries in the coalmine, combining the time-honoured intensity of boyband fandoms with the 24-7 surveillance and parasocial attachments of the social media age. There was no talk of “duty of care” in their season of X Factor. It’s hard to escape the sense that when Payne’s stock fell with the release of his disastrous, lone solo album, 2019’s LP1, he was cut loose and left to flail – by his fans, as much as the music business. If he made the headlines thereafter, it was generally for absurd moments such as his proclamations on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, delivered in an odd mid-Atlantic accent.
He is just the latest victim of an industry that makes meat of youthful talent, hopes and dreams. Two months before I interviewed Payne, I had met Paul Cattermole, who had been absurdly famous in early-00s Britain as part of S Club 7. Having left the band in 2003, when he was 26 years old, Cattermole had spent the following decades grappling with his five years of fame.
Unlike Payne, Cattermole wasn’t made financially, and worked odd jobs to support himself. In 2018, he said he owed £30,000 in taxes and more in legal fees; that year, he sold his Brit award on eBay.
When we spoke, Cattermole was promoting Channel 4’s First Dates Hotel, in which he said he had been approached to appear. I remember thinking: if fame is a drug, it’s like offering a struggling addict another hit.
Cattermole seemed torn between being “up for” reuniting the band to tour and wanting to put it behind him. “I’ve been answering S Club questions for 20 years,” he said. “It will be great – it will be bliss – to one day not have to.” Last year, with an S Club reunion tour on sale, Cattermole died of heart failure.
We can’t know whether Payne would have continued to struggle with the weight of his early fame, as Cattermole did, or found his way to a more peaceful life. But Payne’s death, after all the other lives that have been cut short in the entertainment business, should give us all pause – whether we’re a part of the industry, or simply consuming it.
For all his bravado and relief at having apparently put the worst behind him, Payne seemed aware that he was walking a tightrope. He didn’t know if he would always be famous, he said. But “once you start, you can’t really press the stop button”.