He was one of the stars of One Direction. Liam Payne died this Wednesday in Buenos Aires (Argentina) “after falling from the third floor of a hotel,” local police said. The British author and composer was 31 years old.
For an entire generation of fans who have acclaimed his boy band over the last decade, this announcement comes as a shock. It was solo that Liam Payne auditioned for the “X Factor” talent show across the Channel in 2010, two years after a first unsuccessful attempt. He was then 17 years old and two members of the jury, producer Simon Cowell and singer Nicole Scherzinger, smelled his potential. They asked him to join other candidates who had also come to try their luck alone: Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson… This is how the group One Direction, nicknamed “1D” by fans, was born.
Phenomenal success
In the final of the show, the boy band only finished on the third step of the podium but then enjoyed phenomenal success, mainly with a teenage audience, until their separation in 2016.
The five studio albums, carried by hits such as What Makes You Beautiful, Story of My Life or Drag Me Downhave sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. 1D also collected trophies, including seven Brit Awards and as many American Music Awards. This true pop culture phenomenon came to a halt after Zayn Malik announced his departure from the group in March 2015. With the exhausting pace of international tours and the hyper-media attention that was focused on the boy band, the heart cannot Wasn’t really there anymore.
Post-One Direction was more complicated for Liam Payne. If Harry Styles has traced his path with a series of triumphs, he took the time to come back by first releasing an EP in 2018, then, the following year, an album, LP1. The latter, although gold in the United Kingdom and platinum in Canada, did not meet with a massive response elsewhere (it did not do better than 153rd in the French top).
Father of a 7 year old child
At the beginning of the summer of 2023, he revealed that he had spent one hundred days in a detoxification center to cure his addictions to alcohol and social networks. “I needed to take some time for myself because, somewhere, I no longer recognized the person I had become,” he declared. And I’m sure you guys didn’t recognize me either. I was out of shape and was very happy to take a break from my life and work. »
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2024 was to be the year of his return to the forefront. In the spring, Liam Payne delivered the single Teardropsthe first extract from the new album on which he announced he was working. Last year, he had to postpone his planned tour of Latin America due to a kidney infection.
During his career, Liam Payne was also accustomed to the columns of celebrity magazines between sensational or unkind declarations towards his former acolytes and love stories under the flashes of the paparazzi. Between 2016 and 2018, he was notably in a relationship with singer and ex-member of the girls band Girls Aloud Cheryl Tweedy, ten years older, with whom he had a son, Bear Grey, now 7 years old. Recently, the artist was in a relationship with the American actress and model Kate Cassidy.
