The tortured fame of Liam Payne He was doomed to be a perpetual teenager

On TikTok, the BBC is running a livestream of a vigil in Buenos Aires; women in their mid-twenties gather with candles and side-fringes, singing One Direction ballads in heavy accents. News of Liam Payne’s sudden death aged 31 has broken overnight; X timelines are raking through “crime scene” photos from the singer’s hotel room. The fanbase is in crisis. “Did he even know how much he freaking meant to us?” pleads one. A video from a club in the UK captures the moment Payne’s death was announced — around midnight on Wednesday. It goes viral. The DJ honours the moment by playing a 1D song; girls are crying as they dance. For the original “Directioners”, this is a sea-change moment; it is the first time that many have experienced the death of a teen idol.

It is easy to forget just how big a deal One Direction once was. Though for my part a vehicle for delicious teenaged disdain, this X-Factor-forged grouping made its way from the brain of Simon Cowell into the dreams and diaries of a generation of teenage girls. So widespread was the contagion that the general phrase “in one direction” could not be uttered in a classroom without at least a couple of girls whooping. These Harry Styles fangirls (for it was always Harry, not Liam, who commanded the most attention) are now professional women hurtling towards their thirties — who still hold a dim candle for the floppy-haired fivesome, and still plan on walking down the aisle to Story of my Life. One school friend, wistfully recalls the O2 gig for their 2013 Take Me Home tour. “In a way, we’ve all grown up with the boys of One Direction,” she tells me, with a reverence last heard when the Queen died.

Zayn Malik’s departure in 2015, followed by the band’s “indefinite hiatus”, prompted a period of mourning compared at the time — to the dismay of most — with John leaving the Beatles in 1969. If Lennon’s assassination had taken place in the age of Musk’s X rather than in fax-tastic 1980, the response may well have been similar to yesterday morning’s World of Payne conspiracy bed-in. For the social-media response to Liam Payne’s death was, to put it simply, a mess. It represents the bottom of the barrel of feverish panic untethered from reality, frenzied feeling untempered by context. Twitter is awash with unverified images of a smashed television, a dirty bathroom scattered with burnt foil, lighters, white powder on a desk and a blackened soda-can lid. A spurious source tells of a drug-addled attempt to jump into a pool from a balcony. Others blame Payne’s ex-girlfriend Maya Henry, whose roman à clef, Looking Forward, said to be based on their fraught relationship, has just come out. In it, the main character, Mallory, starts going out with Oliver, a former member of the winkingly named band 5Forward. Oliver is violent, addicted and constantly threatening suicide.

The Maya question becomes the touch paper for a savage social-media row about toxic relationships and accountability. Elsewhere, unsubstantiated rumours of forced abortions bubble up; the One Direction fandom, known for ruthlessly hunting down suspected girlfriends when the band was together, seems to have carried on the toxic feminine fixation into grisly finger-pointing in this moment of tragedy — not unlike how Yoko Ono was singled out as the catalyst for Lennon’s departure from the Beatles. And Liam-Lennon comparisons don’t end there. While the latter’s solo career merits considerably more praise than Payne’s — as anyone who’s both seen the questionable choreography for 2017’s “Strip That Down” and listened to the masterwork that is “Plastic Ono Band” knows — both had difficult final years, pockmarked by addiction and abuse allegations. Lennon’s little-remarked-upon Reagan fanboy era is less embarrassing than anything Payne has said, thought or breathed since 2016, but Lennon had the grace of analogue media, so that interview blips vanished into the ether.

Payne, conversely, has suffered many moments of accidental virality since leaving the band: the worst was in the aftermath of Will Smith’s wife-defending bitchslap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. Caught by a Good Morning Britain reporter on the red carpet, jaw swinging and eyes wide, Payne embarked on a bizarre two-minute, 27-second appraisal of the slap. “There were three losers in one fight,” he drawled, with the dawn-defying certainty of someone standing in a stranger’s kitchen at 6am. “He didn’t know, being Chris Rock. He didn’t wanna do what he had to do, being Will Smith. And she did nothing, being Jada.” He went on to designate Smith “one of the world’s best emoters”, confirming — presumably in a moment of paranoia — “We’re all very human, right?” Another similarly viral moment is a clip from an interview with Logan Paul that same year, in which he recalls a physical fight with a 1D bandmate. Having been thrown up against a wall, Payne rehearses his Liam Neeson-style response: “If you don’t remove those hands, there’s a high likelihood you’ll never use them again.”

Payne’s trajectory is that of the first generation of celebs to become real-time memes; in his lifetime, he was ruthlessly mocked for these moments of cockiness and cringe. The shock, sorrow and speculation on social media rings somewhat hollow given the brutality of those same sites to a man who must have seemed for a time, untouchable — but whose mental health problems were no doubt aggravated by never being truly taken seriously, digitally haunted by his own gaucherie.

To put it in Gen Z terms, “Liam Payne’s fall-off needs to be studied”. His life and death is fascinating because of its trajectory from the waiting rooms of an ITV talent show to the living rooms of millions of Saturday-night viewers, thence to the Twitter feeds of sniggering haters (“have you seen Liam Payne’s filler!”) and now the sombre and legally cautious front pages of the nationals. He leaves behind a seven-year-old son, Bear, fathered with the former X-Factor judge Cheryl Cole, and a murky, desperate legacy. A 14-year-old from Wolverhampton was slingshotted into stratospheric fame on the relentless juggernaut of the X-Factor; too much, too young doesn’t even cut it. The hordes of parasocial teenage fans, the feverish fanfiction imagining homoerotic encounters between 1D bandmates, the ever-available drugs which, if those photos are anything to go by (and they very much may not be) had reached the final, deadly form of freebase cocaine.

It’s a narrative that repeats itself in public breakdowns or tragedies every few years — from Macaulay Culkin to Drew Barrymore, via fellow talent show martyr Darius Campbell Danesh, from the Pop Idol era of celebrity, who died in 2022 after inhaling chloroethane. For Payne and others, the fact of growing up a matinee idol, a teen heart-throb, must cause a fission in identity: you are both the “normal boy” plucked from obscurity and the floppy-fringed one on the bedroom wall. Payne’s latter-day pomposity cannot have been helped by forming this identity in rooms populated only by fans and yes-men; he never had the opportunity to be swerved on the dance floor, to be chastised or nurtured or corrected.

The One Direction boys were subject to a fame so glaring that it burrows into any vulnerability and seeks endless revenge for, as is inevitable, not ending up the person a 12-year-old fan imagined you to be 10 years ago. For Payne, whose struggles with mental health and addiction were well documented, it was a spotlight which he did not survive. Fame and youth produce a strange chemical reaction which freezes its subjects in perpetual teenage heartthrob-dom; while 1D’s fans have got jobs, filed tax returns, even started families, Payne was left to chase the impossible ideal of his 14-year-old self these women once loved him for. For all but the most hysterical of these grown-up Directioners, his death will prompt only a surprised grunt and 10 minutes of disinterested scrolling; those who once wept in arenas as he sang now have Tubes to catch, dogs to walk, lives to get on with. And Liam Payne himself? He’s just another young star to die drugged-up and paranoid, staring into the abyss, when he just needed to be put to bed and told everything is okay.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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