When One Direction first burst on to the scene they were hailed as the new Beatles – besieged by hysterical fans and triumphant in the States, with a succession of impossibly catchy hits.
And if 1D were the Fab Four (or Five) reborn for the 21st century, Liam Payne appeared to be their George Harrison. Moody, introverted, sardonic and often uncomfortable with his fame, he was the Quiet One.
But unlike The Beatles, One Direction were a wholly manufactured boyband, a collection of teenage strangers moulded into an artificial gang for The X Factor, essentially a TV talent contest. Payne was not yet 17 when the show made all five instant celebrities in 2010.
The intense pressure of global mega-fame, at such a young age, proved overwhelming for each of them, but it was Payne who suffered worst. He quickly began drinking hard to cope with the isolation.
Liam Payne with girlfriend Kate Cassidy, who was in Argentina with him before his death
Payne, Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik on the X Factor, after they were moulded into One Direction
Payne has a son, Bear, with singer Cheryl, who was one of the judges during his X Factor stint
‘We were always locked in our hotel rooms at night,’ he said. ‘Then it would be car, stage, sing… like they pulled the dust cloth off, let us out for a minute, then it’s like: “Get back underneath here.”
‘So at a certain point, I just thought, “Well, I’m going to have a party for one,” and that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life. And then you look back at how long you’ve been drinking – it was wild, but it was the only way I could get the frustration out.’
Life after the band split in 2016 became more fractured still. He began living with singer Cheryl (nee Tweedy, ex-Cole, ex-Fernandez-Versini), ten years his senior, who had been one of the X Factor judges when One Direction formed. They had a son, Bear, in 2017.
After that relationship disintegrated, a fling followed with supermodel Naomi Campbell, who was 23 years older than him. Later he became engaged to Texan model Maya Henry, who was eight years younger. At first it appeared he had found a soulmate, but their love affair spiralled into trouble and obsession.
Henry broke off the engagement and earlier this year published a novel, Looking Forward, about a lonely American girl whose fan worship for her English boy-band idol turns into a romantic nightmare.
‘Inspired by true events,’ as the cover proclaims, it describes the aftermath of a traumatic abortion and features one scene where the drug-ravaged star chases his girlfriend with an axe.
Payne begged her not to publish the book, and earlier this week Henry revealed how he was bombarding her and her mother with texts. Instructing lawyers to issue Payne with a ‘cease and desist’ order, she said: ‘Ever since we broke up, he messages me, will blow up my phone – it’s always from different phone numbers too so I never know where it’s going to come from.’
Despite its disturbing content, she said, the novel was not a full exposé: ‘There are a lot of worse things that I left out.’
Payne’s latest relationship was with internet ‘influencer’ Kate Cassidy, and the last image he posted online showed them together with the caption, ‘Quality time’. They were in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires to see a concert by fellow 1D band member Niall Horan. Amateur video of him at the show two weeks ago captured him singing along, visibly under the influence of drink or drugs.
By that stage, home was a mansion in Buckinghamshire.
So Payne’s life was a mixture of medical struggles and the pursuit of stardom from the beginning. He once said he was ‘born effectively dead,’ premature and unresponsive. His first four years were dominated by hospital treatments for kidney malfunction: one of his kidneys was badly scarred and barely functioned.
As a child, growing up in Wolverhampton, he needed 32 injections in his arm each morning and evening. He was the youngest of three, revelling in attention from his older sisters, and loved to sing and dance in front of the television.
On a family break at a holiday camp, aged five, he entered his first talent contest, performing Let Me Entertain You by Robbie Williams. His parents Geoff, a tradesman, and Karen, an infant nurse, doted on him but, by the time he reached secondary school, his showbiz ambitions and the support of his family were causing resentment among classmates.
Payne with Maya Henry, his ex-fiancee, who published a novel this year based on their turbulent and problematic relationship
A purported final photograph of Liam Payne at the the Casa Sur Hotel in Buenos Aires shows the singer leaning against a wall wearing a white sleeveless top with his tattoos visible
He took up running, rising at dawn to run six miles before school and competing at county level in the 1,500 metres. To fend off bullies, he also began boxing – suffering a broken nose and a perforated eardrum. At school, he got into fights too, and was threatened with expulsion.
He had a reputation as a wide boy, selling sweets in the playground. ‘You can’t just sit around doing nothing,’ he later said. ‘Get out there and make things happen. Flog stuff on eBay.’
But he also showed a troubling adolescent tendency to pursue girls obsessively, pleading with them to go out with him. One turned him down around 20 times, before he cornered her and sang Let Me Love You (a hit at the time for American R&B star Mario) until she gave in. She dumped him the next day.
He was barely 14 when he signed up for The X Factor in 2008. ‘People had told me I was a good singer so I thought I would give it a go,’ he said. In an oversized shirt and baggy jeans that made him look even younger than he really was, he performed Fly Me To The Moon, snapping his fingers like Sinatra and throwing a cheeky wink to Cheryl.
Music impresario and judge Simon Cowell told him, in his typically brutal way, that Payne had potential but lacked ‘a bit of grit, a bit of emotion… there’s 20 per cent missing for me at the moment’.
He survived on the show for another couple of weeks before being eliminated. Cowell told him to reapply in two years’ time. After the episode aired, Payne was in a McDonald’s when a girl he didn’t know recognised him and shrieked: ‘X Factor reject!’
Cowell didn’t forget him, though, and two years later recruited him for an X Factor boy band alongside Harry Styles, a superstar to the manner born, gifted soul singer Zayn Malik, and teenage heartthrobs Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson. Payne’s role was to supply a dash of melodic sweetness, singing the falsetto harmony lines.
But the artificial dynamic was never easy. ‘At the start we couldn’t get past our own egos,’ Payne said. ‘Everybody had their own little thing – it was like having four older brothers.’
One Direction made it through to the final in 2010, with Payne taking a solo spot as they performed Your Song by Elton John. To Cowell’s obvious chagrin, the public vote placed them third, behind Matt Cardle and Rebecca Ferguson, but the band were rewarded with a record contract in any case, signing to Cowell’s Syco label.
A tour with other X Factor contestants followed, though the band already seemed to be in a different league thanks to the hysterical devotion of their fans. They recorded their first album, Up All Night, in 2011, filled with addictive pop and featuring the stand-out single What Makes You Beautiful.
After topping the charts in the UK and Ireland, and scooping a Brit award for Best British Single, they turned to the US with a highly professional social media campaign. Up All Night duly went straight to No 1 in America, followed by two more hit albums and a concert movie.
At first, Payne was cast as the band’s spokesman, the diplomat. Fans dubbed him ‘Daddy Directioner’.
One of Payne’s final selfies in Buenos Aires was captioned: ‘Lovely day in Argentina’
‘I’ve always been a bit of an older soul,’ he claimed. ‘I was put in with a group of rowdy teenagers. When I was at school, I had mates but I was always with my dad. So then I was stuck with these boys (his bandmates) and when something was going wrong, I’d get a phone call. If there was an apology needed, it was me (who made it).’
While on tour in Australia in 2013, he once tweeted a warning to fans not to lay siege to the band’s hotel because the surrounding fields might harbour poisonous snakes.
One incident affected him badly. Reunited for an evening with his parents, he tried to take them out for a meal but on the way to the restaurant they were mobbed by fans and paparazzi. His mother was barged to the ground. When they reached safety, Payne burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably.
This type of pressure was unsustainable. Malik was the first to crack, quitting the band in 2014. One Direction limped on as a quartet for a year, before the inevitable solo albums began to appear.
Payne became directionless, in every sense. Despite being the band’s chief songwriter, he struggled to decide what musical style he wanted to develop. His management paired him with a succession of co-writers: ‘It was almost like blind dating,’ he said.
‘Even in my therapy sessions, my therapist asked me: ‘What do you like doing?’ And I’m like: ‘I don’t know!’ I was 21, 22, when I started doing my own thing, so it’s all a bit scary and can be a bit lonely. The biggest thing was figuring out who the hell we all were without each other around.’
He achieved one hit single, Strip That Down – a title that reflected his penchant for posing on photo shoots in nothing but pants, showing off his tattoos and muscles. He became a model for Hugo Boss underwear, hoping that this would elevate him to the level of David Beckham and Brad Pitt.
His failure to establish himself as a genuine A-lister was cruelly underlined at a Los Angeles party when he spotted rappers P Diddy and Jay-Z with actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Payne went over to introduce himself and was met with sneers: ‘As I shook Diddy’s hand he just chuckled, the most evil laugh I’ve ever heard.’
As Payne’s success ebbed away, he saw his debut album fail to enter the US Top 100, and reach no higher than No 17 in the UK. The title LP1, a pun on his initials, didn’t really work and neither did the music – a mix of forgettable ballads and tepid dance.
Despite working out furiously in the gym, he was drinking harder than ever. ‘There was a lot of stuff,’ he told GQ magazine in 2019. ‘I spent a lot of time drinking to escape the crazy world that I had created for myself. I was getting into really bad, bad situations. And I hit a peak moment where I knew the drinking was going to get me.’
In 2023, he revealed he had spent 100 days in a Louisiana rehab after hitting ‘rock bottom’.
During his three-month stay at the centre, he had minimal contact with the outside world and spent a lot of time of focusing on art and poetry.
In total, he quit alcohol for a year – ‘the only vice was cigarettes’ – but found no solace in sobriety. ‘My social life plummeted, I was the biggest recluse on the planet.’
It was not to last. In September 2023, he was hospitalised in Italy after ‘falling ill’ and suffering ‘agonising pain’ thought to be linked to a kidney infection.
In a podcast two years earlier, he had told Dragon’s Den star and podcaster Steven Bartlett that he had considered suicide. ‘You would never have seen it. I’m very good at hiding it,’ he said. ‘But I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be. It was really, really severe.’
During lockdown, he retreated completely, spending weeks at a time watching Netflix alone and drinking on the sofa. Unable to visit his son Bear, then aged four, he would talk to the child over Zoom calls on his phone, trying not to slur his words.
‘I put on so much weight,’ he said. ‘I was eating badly. There were a few pictures of me, all bloated out. I call it my pills-and-booze face. I just didn’t like myself very much.’
In June 2022 he told another podcaster, Logan Paul, that frictions within 1D had been so bad that violence sometimes simmered just below the surface. One bandmate, he said, once picked him up and slammed him against a wall.
One Direction still inspires furious but divided loyalties among its fans, who often despise some members as much as they adore others. Their wrath scorched him, and he was forced to apologise, saying he had expressed himself badly.
As allegations of stalking and obsessive behaviour dogged him, and his own revelations about fights and alcohol abuse tarnished his past, Liam Payne was left with only the worst, sourest remnants of his fame.
Whatever he thought he wanted when he first appeared on The X Factor, it wasn’t this.
