Liam Payne, the ‘responsible one’ in teen sensation boy band One Direction
Liam Payne, who has died aged 31 after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, found fame in 2010 with the boy band One Direction; he was also a fixture of the tabloid press thanks to his relationship with Cheryl Cole, star of an earlier television reality competition.
One Direction, a product of the talent show The X Factor, was one of the great musical stories of the past two decades. As the biggest boy band of their era this hormone-popping quintet delivered a raft of supremely well-crafted hits that became the soundtrack of a generation with their lively humour, distinct character and a charm so fizzing that they became the public face of Pepsi.
If Harry Styles was the flamboyant ladies’ man, while Louis Tomlinson was fun and energetic, Niall Horan charming and laid back, and Zayn Malik brooding and mercurial, that left Payne to be the responsible one. “I’ve always been a bit of an older soul,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2017. “When something was going wrong, I’d get a phone call. If there was an apology needed, it was me. I was the spokesperson for the band, as it were, with the press and the label.”
He was, nevertheless, a heart throb, attention he fuelled with a series of shirtless Instagram posts. Athletic and handsome in a former youth-footballer sort of way, this singing six-pack, as he was once described, later deployed his physical charms in a series of raunchy underwear shots for the Hugo Boss fashion label. His arms and hands were heavily upholstered with tattoos, highlights of which included some thick black arrows on one forearm that looked like road markings.
Payne had first auditioned for The X Factor in 2008, at the age of 14, singing Fly Me to the Moon, one of the few songs he could manage at the time his voice was breaking. He reached the judges’ house, where the show’s svengali Simon Cowell told him to come back two years later.
He did just that, delivering a rendition of Cry Me a River. Cowell thrust him together with his One Direction colleagues who, like him, had all auditioned as solo artists.
Although the nascent group came third, they stood out as having the most potential. They were signed to Cowell’s record label, Syco, in a reported £2 million deal and a pop sensation was born.
Their first album, Up All Night (2011), filled with catchy numbers, was followed by the equally synthetic-yet-moreish Take Me Home (2012). Then came books, wall calendars and even a film.
Fans, mostly female and largely aged between 12 and 19, queued for days just to get a glimpse of their idols. The closer they got to seeing them, the louder they squealed. Their relatively wholesome image, described as “kiddy pop with a touch of promiscuity”, appealed to their fans’ parents, and in 2013 they were photographed with the Prime Minister David Cameron outside 10 Downing Street to promote their recording of the official Comic Relief single.
While Payne had a fine voice, he saw himself as an intrinsic part of the creative process. By the time of One Direction’s third and fourth albums, Midnight Memories (2013) and Four (2014), he was being credited as songwriter on the majority of the band’s tracks.
One Direction went on to sell more than 20 million records in six years, becoming the first group in history to have their first four albums enter the US charts at No 1. They toured the world numerous times, earning a preposterous amount of money, and in 2014 the Sunday Times Rich List calculated their combined wealth to be more than £70 million. Even after Malik left in 2015 they continued to thrive, with Payne picking up the majority of his former colleague’s lines. There was, however, to be only one more album, Made in the AM (2015).
One Direction went on “indefinite hiatus” in January 2016. Although Payne signed a solo record deal, he was by this time too content in his personal life to find anything much to say musically. “It’s easy to spill your guts out on a ballad. But I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I’m really happy – what am I going to write about?’” he said. It was a situation that would not last.
Liam James Payne was born in Wolverhampton on August 29 1993, the youngest child and only son of Geoff Payne, a fitter with Goodrich Aerospace, and his wife Karen, a nursery nurse; he was born with only one functioning kidney, although the problem was not diagnosed until he was four. On holidays he serenaded his relatives from the karaoke machine, especially during visits to his grandfather Ken’s pub in Cornwall.
Money was tight and the family home small, but he remembered it as a happy one. “My place was on the floor with the dog, there was no space on the sofa,” he said. “Dad was in debt, but they did the best they could. It makes you dream a bit, you know?” The success of One Direction enabled Payne to provide for his family; he did not permit stardom to dilute his thick Midlands accent.
He was educated at Collingwood Primary School and St Peter’s Collegiate School, in his spare time enjoying boxing and running and achieved a degree of success on the track. At the age of 12 he appeared as Tony Manero in a staging of Saturday Night Fever by the local Pink Productions theatre company. Later he studied music technology at City of Wolverhampton Technical College.
In his teens Payne was briefly a mini-celebrity in his home town. On one occasion he was performing a Justin Timberlake cover at an under-18s gig when somebody threw a coin at his face and managed to draw blood. He also sang for a crowd of almost 30,000 before a Wolverhampton Wanderers home game against Manchester United.
His post-One Direction solo career and attempts at DJ-ing never reached the heights that he had enjoyed with the band. His biggest hit was his first single, Strip That Down (2017), an RnB pop song with the American rapper Quavo that reached No 3 in the British charts and No 10 in the US and notoriously included the line “I used to be in 1D/Now I’m out, free”.
In March he released the single Teardrops, describing it as “born from many tears. Some are mine. Others are not.”
In recent months details had emerged of his personal struggles while with One Direction, a period he described as sometimes being “a little bit toxic”. In 2022 he was interviewed for a podcast with Logan Paul while under the influence of alcohol. The following year he was admitted to hospital with a kidney infection.
He was also admitted to a rehab facility, proudly marking his first 100 days sober. On the day of his death, however, the hotel where he was staying in Argentina called the police to report that a guest had been drinking and that his behaviour was erratic.
Payne first met Cheryl Cole, née Tweedy, who was 10 years his senior, when she was an X Factor judge in 2008; he winked at her and she called him “cute”. They bumped into one another over the years, and in 2014 worked together on a remix of one of her songs. In 2017 they had a son, Bear, named after the growling noises made during his first sleeps. On Payne’s left arm was a scale depiction of Cheryl Cole’s eye, “so my missus can always keep an eye on me,” he said.
The relationship ended in 2018. At other times Payne was linked with The X Factor dancer Danielle Peazer, the model Naomi Campbell and the model Maya Henry. Since 2022 he had been in a relationship with the influencer Kate Cassidy, who survives him, as do his son, his parents and his two sisters.
Liam Payne, born August 29 1993, died October 16 2024