Liam Payne released his latest song on March 1. It is titled Teardrops (Tears) and starts with his identifiable falsetto (one of his specialties) and then intons: “I don’t know how to love you when I’m broken. / All we do is break ourselves. / Lately I’ve been struggling to see the sunrise.” For those looking for crumbs along the way to decipher the singer’s mood in recent times, perhaps these lyrics offer some clue. Payne (Wolverhampton, England) died at the age of 31 this Wednesday in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after falling from the third floor of the CasaSur hotel, in the Palermo neighborhood. He was in the Argentine capital to accompany his former One Direction bandmate, Niall Horan, who performed at the city’s Movistar Arena on October 2. In a first statement, the police indicated, according to the Reuters agency, that they had gone to the hotel after receiving a call about a disturbance caused by “an aggressive man, who could be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”
Payne was a fundamental part of the British One Direction, the last great boy band, those boy groups almost always organized by directors of companies that were so relevant in the commercial pop industry: Take That, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Westlife… One Direction shipped 70 million copies in just six years of career, from 2010 to 2016 Payne participated in a good part of the compositions, in addition to singing, like his other four companions. Payne was basic in the group’s machinery, a kind of conciliator and ego manager, a retaining wall against the boys’ jealousy. Surely this pacifying authority was earned for being the seed of the creation of One Direction. At just 14 years old, Payne auditioned for the British musical talent show Factor X. On that occasion, the demanding Simon Cowell told him to “come back in two years.” She did it and embroidered a version of Cry Me a River. Cowell himself was in charge of selecting the other four singers among the contestants of Factor X until he formed One Direction with Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne.
With an affable, sensitive and disciplined character, he became the arbiter of his teammates’ disputes. At first he also kept a low profile when the boys decided to have a party. “They called me Mr. Boring,” he said in an interview. After a year of success with the group, Payne threw away his formality and offered himself to the pleasures that fame gave him: relationships, alcohol, drugs. Over time, Payne’s behavior became more erratic, preferring little company and the minibar in his luxurious hotel room.
The first to leave the group was Zayn Malik. A few more months followed, but in 2016 a hiatus in his career was announced. And until now. Attention: One Direction are not officially disbanded. After the break, Payne underwent therapy and spent time in a clinic specializing in education for healthy living. In 2017 he published Strip That Down, an interesting song, surely the best of his career, silky soul with the contribution of the American Quavo, member of the fantastic hip hop group Migos. The song had an impact and it seemed that his career was going to skyrocket. But a relapse into alcohol stopped him dead. “My social life completely collapsed,” he said in an interview with The Guardian.
Payne missed the boat: when he released his first solo album, LP1, In 2019, the followers of One Direction and commercial pop had displaced him from their priorities and all their attention fell above all on Harry Styles. The album received low ratings in the music media and, most importantly, had no commercial success. Payne directed her professional ambitions into another field and posed as a Hugo Boss model. Personally, he had broken up with the mother of his son, Cheryl Cole, in 2018. In 2022 he offered an interview at the podcast of Logan Paul where he let out the accumulated resentment: he talked about his bad relationship with Malik and described an incident in the dressing room after a concert where “one of the group threw me against the wall.” The topical ballad Teardrops, edited this 2024, it was his last attempt to reconnect with success…