‘It would have killed me’: One Direction’s Liam Payne on what it would have been like staying with the British boy band

Four years after boy band One Direction announced the “break” that would become an all-but-confirmed break-up, Liam Payne is opening up about the ways teenage international superstardom affected his well-being.

“We were definitely overworked, 100 per cent, in the band,” Payne said during the Table Manners podcast hosted by Jessie Ware. “I needed to stop, definitely. It would have killed me.

“You’re either going to end up a crazy child star who dies at whatever age, or you’re going to live life and actually get on with it,” Payne said of his life post-One D, noting he finally knows how to drive and has spent the past couple of years figuring out “how to be a person”.

Now 26, Payne is working as a solo artist and model and has a 2½-year-old son with his ex, singer Cheryl Cole. But it’s taken him a while to learn how to process the fame he was suddenly catapulted into after that fateful 2010 X-Factor audition that launched One Direction.

Sudden fame was overwhelming, Payne said. And he often tried to cope with the relentless tour and writing schedule (One Direction released five albums and performed four international tours between 2011 and 2015) with alcohol.

“It scared the [expletive] out of me,” he said of the band’s success. “You have to realise what the possibilities are. I feel like I was a little bit in self-destruct mode because I knew it was going really well. Success is the bit that’ll kill you, more than anything … You’ve got no control over your life. I lost complete control over everything.”

Zayn Malik left the band in March 2015, sending fans into a frenzy months before the four remaining members – Payne, Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlin – announced the “break” in August that turned into an indefinite hiatus. The five have since released their own solo projects, with no reunion in sight.

Is Payne still close with the other guys?

“No,” Payne said. “It’s no offence, I’ve got no bad bones with any of them. Everyone goes to work, you have people you associate with at work, but you don’t see them outside of work.

“We don’t really have a job together any more. With someone like Harry, for example, I don’t have very much in common with the boy. I can go have a drink with him. Fine, whatever. We just don’t really have much in common.”

Despite the rough patches, Payne now reports he is the “happiest I’ve ever been in my life”.

“I feel like everything’s working out nicely now.”