Last night, while catching up with school friends over a bottle of wine, conversation turned, as it inevitably does whenever we get together, to One Direction. It was a decade ago, we realised, that we had woken up at 5am, got the bus to Wembley and skipped school to be first in the queue for their Where We Are tour. All of us now 25 — with grown-up jobs and complex lives — reminisced about the simplicity of those early teen years when we followed the band and how far-removed from that we feel now. How silly we once were, we said.
A few minutes after we parted ways, one of the group messaged our chat. “Have you seen this? People are saying that Liam Payne is dead.” And suddenly, we didn’t feel far-removed from those teenage years at all.
In the hours that followed, it emerged that Liam had fallen from the third floor of his hotel balcony in Argentina, after police were called to the hotel following reports of an "aggressive man who may have been under the effects of drugs and alcohol".
Reflexively, I opened X/Twitter, the app which was the birthplace of 1D fandom, to see an outpouring of grief from a community of young women my age which had laid dormant for years. Old fan accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, which had been gathering dust since the band’s hiatus in 2015 were suddenly active again, sharing condolences and memories.
“I feel like most of us are so shocked over Liam Payne's death cause that man once was part of something our 13-year-old selves could never imagine living without,” wrote one fan. “The way my entire childhood of being an insane diehard 1D fan just played in my head like a film reel”, said another.
It is easy to forget just how unprecedented the cultural phenomenon of One Direction was. We haven’t, I believe, even come close to examining the extent of their cultural dominance in the relatively short years they were together. Formed by Simon Cowell as just teenagers on the 2011 series of The X Factor, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik were a tour de force. In sheer numbers alone, it is staggering: they sold over 200 million records worldwide, became the first band in the US Billboard 200 history to have their first four albums debut at number one, and their third album was the best-selling album worldwide of 2013.
The feverishness which surrounded them is often compared, understandably, to Beatlemania. But that is to misdiagnose their impact. While the intensity of feeling between the two bands might have been similar, the heady mixture of nascent social media platforms and the sudden (and unregulated) ubiquity of smartphones, fostered a cult-like atmosphere around 1D, unparalleled before or since.
They were the ultimate boys next door — an attainable vessel onto which to project a cadre of young, complex female emotion. Where Harry and Zayn were the heartthrobs, and Niall and Louis the class clowns, Liam, for his part, was viewed as the father figure of the group; mature, sensible and level-headed. He undoubtedly had one of the strongest voices in the group, but was always something of an understated presence.
Social media enabled the original parasocial relationship — as fans, we were fed quite literally minute-to-minute updates of their lives via dedicated Twitter accounts, run like the Navy by teenage girls across the world. It was ritual to come home from school, open social media and spend hours immersed in this online community. There were in-group conspiracy theories, sub-plots, whole dialects formed around this singular interest. It was like having a second family — I made friends online from all corners of the world who I spoke to for years. There was no limit to how much love we could give and time we could dedicate to the cause.
There was, of course, the offline element too. Rooms covered floor to ceiling in One Direction posters, bookshelves lined with their various autobiographies. When my friends and I finally got tickets to see them in 2014, we sat outside Wembley stadium for 12 hours in the blazing sun to make sure we were in the front row. Hours were spent scheming up various excuses to our teachers as to why we wouldn’t be in school (the matching sunburn the next day was something of a giveaway).
We are grieving the person we idolised as children, not the person he might have gone on to become
Mainstream culture was, and still is, quick to stigmatise the intensity of young female emotion. The perceived hysteria of Directioners, like their compatriots, the Beliebers, was looked upon with ridicule and scorn. We were mocked for falling for a manufactured group carefully designed to appeal to our overflowing hormones, and who didn’t make “real music”. To this day, it still feels slightly embarrassing to admit that part of my life to people. But as I get older, I can appreciate that there was something deeply special about the community space fostered by that shared love.
No doubt, in his later years Liam was a flawed and imperfect person. In the years post 1D, he had launched a solo career, with his 2017 debut single Strip That Down, and had a now seven-year-old child with Cheryl Cole. But there had been many problems. He spoke of struggling with alcohol and substance abuse, and recently, disturbing allegations of abuse from his ex-girlfriend Maya Henry have emerged.
I, like everyone else who didn’t know him personally, am in no place to comment on that. But for those of us who grew up with One Direction, we are grieving the person we idolised as children, not the person he might have gone on to become. It is a strange loss, one that is difficult to navigate. But the heart of that little fangirl still lives in me somewhere, and it is hurting. I know I’m not the only one.
