They still scream. Four years after One Direction went on a hiatus that looks more permanent with every SNL shading and deathless interview comment, Liam Payne can still make girls giddy. Or, rather, not girls anymore. Women. It’s the night before the release of his debut solo album, LP1, and he’s launching it in cahoots with Huawei, throwing a listening party where 150 contest winners can preview it on the brand’s new FreeBuds 3 earphones. They nod along happily as the first two tracks play in their ears. They sip their wine – they can legally drink now – and assume this sneak peak is their prize. Then the curtain at the end of the room drops. There’s Liam Payne, the boy whose poster graced millions of bedroom walls, in the flesh.
It’s been 12 years since Payne first appeared on The X Factor; a decade since the birth of One Direction, when on his second audition he and four boys he’d never met were jammed together, formless teenage clay fashioned into a record-selling miracle. They burned bright. They burned out. They split. They grew up. Their fans did, too.
But when he appears, as if summoned up, they still scream. Payne’s music might lack the for-the-jugular songwriting that made One Direction the biggest act on earth for half a decade, but that doesn’t matter. They scream for the idea of Liam Payne, not necessarily the reality. The scream is the memory of dancing to ‘You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful’ in their bedroom. Of a stolen selfie at a record signing, in the days before the tattoos, the drinking problems, the relationship with Cheryl, the sultry underwear campaign.
But for everyone outside this room, outside this scream, these are the things that define him now. The new Liam Payne makes adult music, in the clothes-on-a-bedroom-floor sense of the word. The new album is the fruit of an orchard-full of writers and producers, recorded in studios across the globe, and rattles through tropical house, trap, low-slung funk and, strangest of all, Christmas songs. It’s more like listening to an artist’s entire back catalogue on shuffle than a cohesive album. But in a Spotify playlist world, perhaps that’s the best way to get a hit.
And hits are what Payne wants. He’s competitive, he admits backstage before the show. He's the fourth Directioner to drop an album and he wants his to compare. But he claims not to worry about that too much. He’s done enough worrying since the band split and now, he thinks, he's dealt with it. Therapy. Counselling. Self-examination. He’s done the soul-searching. He's a new man, now. But he still enjoys the scream.
You’ve worked with lots of different producers, lots of songwriters. Do you feel that you have a ‘sound’ at this point?
For the longest time I had no clue whether I had a sound, but the more I listened to the album, the more it seems like there’s a constant seam that goes through the whole thing. Like, with an artist like Migos, a lot of their kind of sound is based around the ad libs and the crazy stuff they do in the background. So yeah, I think at this point I do have a sound, I just can’t really put a wording on it. Because of how many genres of music we’ve done over the last few years – everything from the song I did with Rita [Ora] to a song in Spanish. But it’s kind of nice not to have those boundaries.
Is there a sense of competition with the other guys?
Of course there’s a competition. There’s charts and numbers and figures, but at the same time it’s very hard to compete when we’re doing such different things. It’s like playing different sports almost, with someone doing soft rock music, someone who does hip hop, they’re not really in the same genre and the same people aren’t really listening. So yeah, due to our age and origin, it makes sense for competition. For any other reason, it’s a bit ludicrous.
How much do you speak to them these days?
We send homing pigeons to each other. No, we actually, with a lot of them I haven’t spoken to them. With Harry [Styles] for example – what I always try to describe to people is this, because it’s difficult for people – well, it’s actually not that difficult for people to understand. One Direction was my office. So if you change everything, just put desks in, in an office environment, some people talk, some people don’t talk, there’s something about someone you absolutely hate, that’s literally the way an office works. By the time we got to the end of One Direction, it was like the office ended and that was the end of it. You didn’t come back in. So I spoke to Louis [Tomlinson] more than I spoke to anyone, me and Niall [Horan] saw eye to eye on some things and not others. Then with Harry I just didn’t know anything about him. And that’s not his fault or my fault, it’s just the way that that laid out, when you’ve been put in that room together and then exposed to this whizz-bang of fame.
For people on the outside, it might seem strange that you could have ever spent that much time with people in a really intimate setting, and still have this sense of distance from people.
I mean, we spoke, me and Harry caught a laugh every so often. It wasn’t like we never spoke, that we just saw him around, but it was not like I’d see him on the weekend, that we’d go out or anything together. Because we just don’t have anything in common. I don’t have nothing against the boy, I think he’s a beautiful beautiful person, he’s a very lovely person, and you can see that by how many people he meets that get along with him, the general thing you hear coming back is true. And I can say that from my own experience with him but I just haven’t spoken to him for a number of years because our music – I’m like the antichrist version, to his christness.
You’ve talked openly about your drinking recently, about realising you had a problem and going teetotal for a year to try and get it back in check. What was the point that made you realise things had to change?
It was more friends. It wasn’t like an intervention as such, as it were. I think it’s important that you pick one person in life that you really take their opinion on. It’s like you have that PE teacher at school who, when you get told off by them, it hurts 10 times more because you respect them. I have somebody in my life who is very much that person. They were just a bit like, maybe you should look into this. I just went to therapy and spoke about it and spoke to people who’d been through the same things and different things. Russell Brand was one of the people who got me sober for that year. I spent a little bit of time with Russell, went down to meetings in working men’s clubs where it was just me and Russell Brand and loads of factory workers, bin men, whatever you can imagine and they’re telling each other stories. He was recounting his time of before, when he used to whatever, and it was really interesting and it’s nice to feel you’re not alone. In a room full of men as well – I went to loads of different meetings, it was mixed meetings and all sorts – but this first one I did was just a room full of blokes pouring their hearts out. I was like, fucking hell, this is crazy.
Was that experience intimidating at all? You’ve got a very different background, a different experience of drinking. Is it strange being in a place so far removed from the place you spent the last 10 years of your life?
It was comforting actually, more than anything. It was nice to go in a room and everyone was having a chat about stuff and you know, because it’s anonymous, there was always the fear about someone coming out and saying something about me, but they never did. And thats the one thing I’d say, no one even knew until I said I went to therapy that I’d been. So it was really nice that you could sit in that room and tell these stories and hear these stories of different people and different characters coming through that were completely different to you, but going through the same shit.
Do you think there was a sense of community there that perhaps you hadn’t had, spending your youth in such a unique environment?
Yeah, definitely. But for a long, long time, it sort of reminded me of when I used to go to the pub with my old man and I’d sit round chatting different things. It felt a bit like home.
Liam Payne performed an impromptu intimate gig for the Huawei FreeBuds 3 ‘listening party’ at London’s Omeara, allowing fans the opportunity to listen to the new album with crystal clear sound thanks to their active noise cancellation. Buy them here.
