IF THE SPENDING power of teenagers first came to significance with the emerging success of Elvis Presley in the 1950s and the Beatles a decade later, by the time One Direction arrived on the scene in 2010, the commercialism of teen-oriented pop was in hypermode.
With the tragic death of Liam Payne this week, a man who had been famous for 14 of his 31 years, we are faced once again with the grim results of the pressures of fame on young people.
Thrown together in just 10 minutes, as Simon Cowell claims, Payne joined other solo auditionees Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Harry Styles, and Liam Tomlinson to become a ready-made famous boy band. Unlike boy bands that came before them, One Direction’s initial fame was as reality TV stars on The X Factor.
Unlike boy bands that came before them, their success was immediately boosted by Twitter as they became social media crushes while Day One Directioners voted weekly in their thousands to keep them in the competition.
Despite coming third in the seventh series of the music competition franchise created by Cowell, One Direction are the most successful act to emerge from any iteration of The X Factor. Their fanbase is one the most passionate ones out there, and this passion comes from the fact that by voting for their survival, they were an intricate part of the group’s existence.
They were with them on their journey as they walked out of school and their part time jobs and straight onto the world stage. With the relatively new prevalence of Twitter then, 2010 was the dawn of a new and more intense wave of fan culture, one that mirrors ownership, that would only snowball even further for all pop acts in the years to follow.
However, this ownership guaranteed One Direction a future beyond The X Factor. Before they had any songs of their own, they had a strong enough fanbase to suggest that they could be as big as The Beatles, they just needed the songs to secure the deal.
From their 2011 debut What Makes You Beautiful, an earworm that Styles still fits into his live sets, to later singles like Steal My Girl and Kiss You, their fans’ obsession was matched by a discography that played on the obsessive nature of teenage love.
A marketing team’s dream, the boys were the same demographic as their intended audience, making it easy for fans to imagine themselves as the object of their collective affections in their music. The symbiotic nature between One Direction and their Directions only grew stronger, and they never hit a commercial low.
In any band, the public decides who the star is. During the heyday of Take That, as lead songwriter of the group, Gary Barlow was pegged as the one to go the distance if the group ever disbanded.
However, Robbie Williams — once dismissed by Noel Gallagher as the “fat dancer from Take That” — went on to have greater success than his former bandmates, together or solo, ever had. Every solo act wants to be The Robbie, and for some reason, the law of averages suggests that there is usually only one successful solo member from a big pop band.
So when the band went on an indefinite hiatus in 2016, they faced the same quandary that every member of every boy band since the Beatles has faced: what do you do after you’ve been one fraction of a massively successful global product? Can you return to normality, or do you stay in this strange world of celebrity?
Each member of One Direction went solo, but to varying degrees of success, with Styles sitting at the top of the ladder and Horan sitting a few rungs under him. While Malik comes and goes from the charts and the public eye, Tomlinson and Payne’s solo careers barely took off, with Payne’s 2019 album LP1 garnering quite scathing reviews. This cannot be good for the ego, let alone your own sense of identity.
Much like protégé footballers who are plucked out of school and sent away to train with big clubs, child pop stars are shifted to another realm where everyday tasks, like driving or going to the supermarket or switching mobile networks, are done by somebody else.
If you decide not to be famous, and face a huge drop in your income, what professional skills have you got to rely on? The ones that get left behind have to make peace with the fact that the world might see them as has-beens or failures. An impossible thing to do.
Payne was open about his struggles with alcoholism during his One Direction years. With limited freedom to explore the world that he was touring, he explained on The CEO Podcast that the best way to contain a group of teenage boys was to keep them in their hotel rooms. But this, he said, was where the minibar was, and so began a pattern of dependency that he only recently broke. Last year, he announced that he was 100 days sober.
Reacting to Payne’s death, Boyzone’s Mikey Graham suggested that all record labels hire psychologists as a duty of care to their talent, but reality TV shows need to do more as that fame comes instantly and can drop off just as quickly. When I interviewed Leigh-Anne Pinnock of Little Mix, the 2011 champions of The X Factor, in 2020 for the Irish Times, I asked if the girl group had any psychological support while they were competing. She was outright with her no.
“It is actually mad when you think about it,” she said, “to be treated like you’re a puppet sort of thing? It’s mad. And also, these big labels and these execs must have known what previous artists have been through and not have that level of care in place for these massive shows. It doesn’t really make sense.”
Time and time again, we see people buckle under the pressures of fame in real-time, removing ourselves from the circus of it all. The majority of these people experienced fame from a young age, and it seems that their adult selves could not make the same unreasonable compromises that their younger selves were okay with — or had no choice in — making. And so comes pressure from the people making money from them to continue making money for them, and pressure from the fans for them to keep making the music that they love and to remain their eternal, forever young icons.
All the money and all the fame in the world don’t change the fact that a celebrity is still a human at the end of the day. It’s remarkable that we — the fairweather fans, the diehard fans, the music labels, the critics (armchair and otherwise), the reality TV producers — refuse to learn this lesson.
Louise Bruton is a freelance journalist, specialising in the arts, pop culture and disability rights.
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