How to sum up the unknowable life of another person, only glimpsed in on-camera interviews, music videos, and tabloid photographs? One way might be through the barest biographical facts: to say that Liam Payne was born in 1993 in Wolverhampton, had bunny rabbit curtains in his bedroom until he was in his late teens, and used to sit on the windowsill dreaming of winning the lottery or becoming a singer. He first auditioned for The X Factor at 14; became a member of the globally popular boyband One Direction at 16; had a son, Bear, with the singer and X Factor judge Cheryl Cole when he was 23; released his first and only solo album at 25; and died aged 31 after falling from a balcony at a hotel in Argentina.
Another way might be to start and end with the photos. When One Direction was formed in 2010, the judges Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh and Nicole Scherzinger leaned over a Polaroid of the 16-year-old Payne, placing it alongside three of his four future bandmates, Niall Horan, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, as if they were playing with dolls. “That looks good.” “That looks great.” “It looks unbelievable.” When Payne died on 16 October 2024, the celebrity gossip site TMZ published zoomed-in, cropped photos of his dead body: an arm, part of his side.
This denial of dignity in death was the shameful conclusion of a poisonous type of fame, uniquely suffered by pop stars and teen heartthrobs. Liam Payne was dehumanised his entire life, by the music industry machine that made him famous, by tabloids, by social media, and even by his own fans; being idolised is just as depersonalising as being villainised. He became a pin-up poster, then a literal doll (you could collect all five). The documentary concert film This Is Us, released at the peak of One Direction’s fame in 2013, is, on the surface, a group portrait of the band’s shared, antic boyhood on stage. But it reveals the punishing extent of their tour and recording schedule, and the isolating effects of celebrity. In one scene Payne’s mother buys a cardboard cut-out of her own son: “I shed tears just looking at him. You’ve only got the images. They become someone in a newspaper or a magazine to you.” In another scene, Payne laughs recalling a swarm of fans: “Some girl tried to literally grab my ear. I think she wanted to keep it. But I was like, ‘That’s mine love, you can’t have that… unfortunately, it’s connected.’”
The cycle of objectification continued after One Direction disbanded in 2015, as Payne’s solo career and erratic behaviour in interviews was mocked online. He was once affectionately known as the “dad” of One Direction: more serious, more ambitious, maybe a little embarrassing. As these qualities became more exaggerated and David Brent-esque, compilations of his “most cringe moments” circulated on Instagram and TikTok. That he was open about his mental health and substance abuse issues earned him little sympathy. He told the Guardian “the adrenaline peaks of performing, followed by long troughs of tedium, were akin to a drug addiction [and] he turned to alcohol. ‘Doing a show to however many thousands of people, then being stuck by yourself in a country where you can’t go out anywhere – what else are you going to do? The minibar is always there.’” In another interview, he said the loneliness of fame had “nearly killed” him, and admitted he had experienced suicidal thoughts. (The circumstances of Payne’s fall from the balcony are unclear, though emergency services were called to the hotel to attend “a guest who has had too many drugs and alcohol”.)
The fantasy that One Direction represented to a generation was always co-dependent, the feverish daydreams of millions of teenage girls and the dream-come-true of five young men feeding on one another symbiotically. It’s a dream that now seems an obvious nightmare. Of course, there is something inherently sinister about grown men and women marketing 16-year-old boys to children for maximum profit, at the clear and undeniable risk to their charges’ health and sanity. Why is it so easy to ignore that until one of them dies? As someone who was complicit in every stage of the cycle that robbed Payne of his personhood – from teenage One Direction fan to journalist and morbidly curious onlooker – I felt sick reading the news of his death. How could we justify doing this to such young people – separating them from their families, their normality, and their sense of themselves – then laughing as they fumble their way through adulthood? How many victims does the pop music industry have to produce before something changes?
One Direction was an eccentric name for a boyband. Perhaps it was meant to prefigure the band’s ascent – their “meteoric rise”, to use the glossy magazine cliché – to celestial heights. But it inadvertently suggested something darker – that a youthful, fresh-faced boyband can only last so long, because everything moves in one direction through time. As the novelist Samantha Hunt once wrote in a piece about the band: “One direction is, of course, the only choice they, we, get.” After Liam Payne’s death, it’s hard not to think that both meanings are one and the same, in the end – that to hurtle towards celebrity at such speed, and with so few protections, is to hurtle towards self-destruction, too.
[See also: Has social media pushed fandom to a point of no return?]
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