“When we finished [the TV talent show The X Factor], we thought something might happen, but never anything like this,” said Liam Payne in 2012. “This” was the mammoth presence of One Direction, the boyband that dominated the charts, and the hearts of Directioners – their fan army – from 2010 until 2016.
Payne, who has died aged 31 after falling from a hotel balcony, was initially deemed “the sensible one” by the group’s management, entrusted with keeping his bandmates, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik and Niall Horan, in check. Responsible by nature, Payne went along with it until he discovered that being Daddy Direction, as he was known, was less appealing than being a teenage boy.
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” he told the Guardian in 2019. “And the more fun we had, the more successful it got.” The nuts and bolts part of the success was 70m record sales and months-long tours that, by the end, were too big for any venues but stadiums. The less quantifiable part was the unbreakable devotion of the Directioners, who kept faith with Payne when he began his solo career, and helped his 2017 debut single, Strip That Down, into the Top 10 in the UK and the US.
A Wolverhampton boy who had been set on a career in music since childhood, he found idoldom a mixed blessing. Operating on pop’s frontline was rewarding, inasmuch as his warm, supple voice, which soared with ease to a falsetto, was a key part of One Direction’s sound; he also became involved with the songwriting, contributing to many tracks on their later albums. He and the other members had a genuine rapport, forged by their sharing a situation that nobody who was not a 2010s pop idol could appreciate.
They were strangers to each other when the music mogul Simon Cowell assembled the five solo singers into a group on the 2010 series of The X Factor, but rapidly became close friends. “We make each other laugh,” Payne said. Their split – announced as a “hiatus”, shortly after Malik quit in 2015 – was conducted with equal good humour.
But Payne found the encroachment into the group’s private lives stressful – fans hid in bins outside hotels, and wrote fictional stories that had the members in romantic relationships with each other – and the boredom and loneliness of life on tour was unbearable. The attention made it impossible for the band to go out, and Payne drank heavily to cope with the lows. He had felt desperate at times, he told Radio 1 in 2020: “It was hard to have fun sometimes in that circumstance when there was so much pressure loaded on to it.”
When, in 2012, his mother was knocked over by a photographer, he found himself crying with rage. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this’, and I really hated my life.” When One Direction played the last dates of their final tour in 2015, Payne likened it to counting down to a holiday, with no packed diary to wake up to on the Monday morning.
Once the band split, he considered staying behind the scenes as a songwriter rather than launching a solo singing career. Because he and Tomlinson had cowritten a number of One Direction tracks, they received a larger percentage of album royalties than the others, and Payne saw writing as a way of maintaining control of his career. In the end, offered a record deal, he decided it would be foolish to spurn the chance to sing, free of the hysteria that had surrounded the group. He was encouraged by Cheryl Cole, with whom he was romantically involved; a former member of Girls Aloud turned solo star, she wondered why he would walk away from singing – his passion since he was 14.
Strip That Down, a smoky R&B track that featured the rapper Quavo, made it clear that he was still sorting through his feelings about the One Direction years: “You know I used to be in 1D (Now I’m out, free) / People want me for one thing (That’s not me).” He explained it later as his simply not wanting to be viewed as “that guy from One Direction”.
Strip That Down appeared two months after the birth of Bear, his son with Cheryl. The couple were together between 2016 and 2018, and Bear’s arrival was a boon for Payne, who had wanted to be a young father (he was then 23). After they separated, Payne was involved in his son’s upbringing, but said it was not unusual “for me to be in and out of his life”.
Born in Wolverhampton, Payne was the youngest of Karen and Geoff Payne’s three children. His mother was a nursery nurse, his father a fitter at the aerospace company Goodrich. He was adept at cross-country running and, while at St Peter’s Collegiate school and City of Wolverhampton College, he narrowly missed out on a place in the England schools athletic team. After that, Liam planned to follow his father into the factory and had already looked into an apprenticeship when – having been praised for his singing at karaoke – he decided, aged 14, to audition for The X Factor. His version of Fly Me to the Moon and floppy-haired charm got him as far as the Judges’ Houses stage. He was at Simon Cowell’s house in Barbados, and cried when Cowell told him to go back to school and do his GCSEs.
Two years later, he returned with a smooth-jazz interpretation of Cry Me a River, winning a standing ovation from Cowell and a place in an ad hoc group formed of other solo male singers. Though the winner of the series was Matt Cardle and One Direction came third, it was clear they were going to connect with the public. Their buoyant debut single, What Makes You Beautiful, was an instant chart-topper – the first of 14 British Top 10s.
There were three more No 1s among them, including Little Things, a meditative acoustic number whose video showed the group playing instruments – Payne was on guitar, and clearly knew his way around the instrument. Another Top 5 hit was Best Song Ever, which bounced to an 80s-style pop-rock beat. One of the band’s credos was not to take themselves too seriously, and their videos were frequently funny; in Best Song Ever, Payne was told by the choreographer not to dance “because you are perfect”. His bemused face spoke volumes.
Four of their albums reached No 1 in the UK: Take Me Home (2012), Midnight Memories (2013), Four (2014) and Made in the AM (2015). In the US, they were the first group to go straight in at No 1 with their first four albums (including their debut, Up All Night, which reached No 2 in Britain).
Once Payne got his solo career off the ground, there was no shortage of big names interested in working with him; among the writers of Strip That Down were Ed Sheeran and the super-producer/writer Steve Mac. Few of his subsequent singles caught on, though, and his only other Top 10 showing was For You, a duet with Rita Ora from the Fifty Shades Freed soundtrack. His only album, LP1, explored his interest in trap and urban styles, but was not released until 2019 – too late to benefit from lingering One Direction sizzle. He began work on his second album last year.
He was engaged to an American model, Maya Henry, but they split in 2022. In July 2023 he revealed he had been sober for six months after 100 days in a treatment facility in Louisiana. “I just kind of feel like I’ve got more of a grip on life and everything that was getting away from me,” he said.
He is survived by his son, his parents, and his sisters, Ruth and Nicola.