It was the autumn of 2011, and I had been summoned to Sony Music’s west London HQ to meet Britain’s hottest new boy band.
A few months earlier, five hopeful teenagers had auditioned for ITV’s X Factor talent show – and the music impresario Simon Cowell had drawn them together to form One Direction.
The fledgling stars had already attracted a global fanbase in the millions: a juggernaut that was drawing comparisons to 1960s Beatlemania, even though they had yet to release a song.
Now that was about to change. The band’s debut single, What Makes You Beautiful, was launching the following week – and I was there to interview the boys behind it.
Although they had seemed like sweet young things when we had briefly met at the Fountain Studios in Wembley, north-west London, during their X Factor live shows the previous year, I had expected these precocious adolescents to now be full of self-importance at their growing fame.
How wrong I was.
I arrived to find five handsome young men politely waiting to greet me, but one of them stood out thanks to his cute curly hair and his charming, talkative manner.
No, not Harry Styles – the only ex-1D member who has gone on to forge a successful, long-term solo career – but Liam Payne. Dressed down in a navy hoodie and jeans, Liam wrapped me in a warm hug and excitedly introduced me to his bandmates – Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik – in his strong Wolverhampton accent.
Looking younger than his 18 years, Liam told me how badly he was missing his beloved mum Karen’s cooking – so much so that he had resorted to eating chicken dippers warmed up in the microwave.
Living as he was out of suitcases in hotels, he asked me for ironing tips as he had yet to learn how to use one – and said he still spent much of his free time playing Nintendo.
He admitted that he had practised putting his hands behind his back and trying to sing like his hero Liam Gallagher, the snarling Oasis frontman. ‘I probably looked a bit stupid though,’ he said.
He also spoke lovingly about West Bromwich Albion, the football team he had supported since he was a young boy – though he regretted that he no longer had time to cheer them on in person.
As for girls, Liam told me he preferred shy and quiet ones, although he revealed he’d fallen in love with X Factor’s 2006 winner Leona Lewis, while he found singer Tulisa Contostavlos ‘really, really hot’.
Overall, he struck me as an innocent abroad – a child, really – who seemed too vulnerable a soul to last long in the cut-throat music world.
As the years passed, I met Liam many times at industry events and in chance encounters – and I never shook that worrying sense that he was, in some ways, a lost little boy.
I could never have known, of course, that just 13 years after our first interview, Liam would perish in the most terrible circumstances – following a long spell of torment, scandal and drink and drug abuse.
His descent into addiction had been playing out, in public and in private, for years – worsened by his fragile emotional state.
Many had tried to help him quit the substances that were destroying his life, but to no avail: following his death in Buenos Aires’s five-star CasaSur hotel on Wednesday evening, what appeared to be cocaine and heroin paraphernalia were found in his wrecked suite, with its smashed TV and half-drunk flutes of champagne.
It was a squalid end for one of the most famous young men in the world, so adored by ‘Directioners’ that he insisted he couldn’t leave his hotel without a large security detail (although it’s worth pointing out that other former bandmates, including the global megastar Styles, often travel without huge entourages).
So where did it all go wrong for him – and how did that smiling boy I met all those years ago, rough around the edges as he was, come to such a terrible end?
There is no doubt that he struggled, even more than his bandmates, with that explosive early fame and notoriety.
In a candid moment at 2014’s Brit Awards, Liam told me how difficult he found it to be unable to blend into a crowd. The band’s relentless schedule had taken its toll on him, as had the long months away from home.
He often wished, one of his friends later told me, that he had gone to university like many of his schoolmates.
Of course, Liam came to enjoy a lifestyle unimaginable to his old contemporaries at St Peter’s Collegiate, his Church of England secondary school in Wolverhampton.
Despite his insatiable appetite for drugs, his large property portfolio, his endless jaunts on private jets, taste for high fashion and luxury hotel stays, his bank balance was still thought to be in the millions when he died.
For all his fears that he had peaked so young, he still had decades ahead of him – and ample time to grow into the contented father to Bear, his son with Girls Aloud star Cheryl Tweedy, his friends and family longed for him to become.
But I can reveal that behind that smiling, cherubic face, Liam had suffered serious trauma in his childhood: a shadow from which he felt he could never escape and whose full details the Mail has chosen not to publish.
One friend told me: ‘Before he even began his showbiz career, he had demons from his formative years. He struggled with that and never quite got over it. He was in a band with four other guys, he could get any girl he wanted and he was earning millions – but he struggled to enjoy any of it.’
I can vouch for that: of all the 1D members, Liam seemed by far the most uncomfortable with his fame and fortune.
I would see him most years at the Brits, where at first he would dash over to say hello, often reminding me that he had enjoyed me asking him ‘fun questions’ at our first interview.
Yet as time went on, his chaotic living began to catch up with him, and his manner became ever more unpredictable.
In February 2013, at a Brit Awards afterparty organised by his music label at the upmarket Arts Club in Mayfair, I saw him drunkenly dancing with his bandmates – by far the most bleary-eyed of them.
That December, I bumped into him in the Kurt Geiger shoe shop in Canary Wharf, east London, where he was buying his then girlfriend Sophia Smith – a former school sweetheart – a pair of boots for Christmas.
Gone was his carefree demeanour of just two years earlier, he now seemed strikingly shy. He told me he had bought a penthouse flat in the Docklands, and at my insistence, he posed for a picture with me before dashing off.
Not long before, Liam had completed a gruelling world tour with 1D: by then one of the most successful pop groups in history, selling some 70 million records under Cowell’s watchful eye.
During 2013’s Take Me Home tour, the band performed an average of a concert every two days, completing 124 dates between February and November. That, I’m told, put unbearable pressure on Liam, who would often say that he ‘just wanted to be normal’.
Of course, the fame came with perks – women chief among them. Liam’s best-known romance was with Cheryl, who was ten years his senior, which had begun in 2016 following her split from her French husband Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini.
They quickly became the most talked-about couple in showbiz –and only six months after they were confirmed to be an item, Cheryl revealed she was expecting their baby.
For Liam, however, the pregnancy was a huge shock: he was, he allegedly told friends, not ready to become a dad.
With 1D having gone on ‘permanent hiatus’ in 2016, he was trying to launch his solo career, and becoming a father – especially to a woman a decade older than him –was not part of his plans.
He told friends that he felt like Cheryl, who was 33 when Bear was born, had used him so she could have a baby.
When Bear, now seven, was born in 2017, Cheryl grew increasingly fed up that she was stuck at home with the baby while Liam was away jet-setting.
‘Liam was flying around the world promoting his music,’ said a friend. ‘He was in the zone Cheryl had been in ten years before with Girls Aloud. It led to some furious rows.
‘He began using private jets so he could get home quicker, but it wasn’t enough. Cheryl wanted a proper family unit and Liam just could not give it to her. Things got really bad and tempestuous. Liam was a young lad in his early 20s and he just wasn’t ready for it all.’
Inevitably, they split up – giving Liam even more time to ‘go off the rails’, as one former associate of the star describes it.
Even when they were co-parenting, Cheryl desperately hoped that Liam and Bear would develop a strong father-son bond, despite Liam’s addiction issues.
‘Cheryl knew what a state he was in,’ says a source. ‘She wished she could make it better.’
And she wasn’t alone in that wish: as Liam turned from being a cheerful teenager into a tormented, angry young man, many of those closest to him tried unsuccessfully to rescue him.
He was dropped by more than one of his managers due to his erratic behaviour and his failure to turn up to work engagements.
In September 2017, Cheryl, Liam and Bear went on a luxury holiday to Majorca: a birthday treat for Liam. But he injured himself while drunk.
As the years went on, he only got worse.
In 2022, a gurning Liam appeared to be high on drugs at a post-Oscars party in Hollywood. In footage that went viral for all the wrong reasons, he replaced his Wolverhampton twang with a bizarre Los Angeles accent.
One friend of Liam’s called me in horror to share their fears that he ‘really wasn’t OK’. Last year, Liam moved to a sprawling mansion near the Buckinghamshire town of Chalfont St Giles to be further away from the temptations of London and closer to Bear, who lived nearby with Cheryl.
However, neighbours tell me that he brought his problems with him. They would often spot him coming home in the early hours in chauffeur-driven cars, often with women in tow.
While I’m told he tried to see Bear regularly, his unpredictable lifestyle frequently made this impossible. Instead, Cheryl was largely left to bring up the little boy alone with the help of her mother Joan.
Liam’s new home was also close to a woman who some describe as his fairy godmother – the Olympic heptathlon gold medallist Denise Lewis.
Her husband Steve Finan worked with Liam for several years and the couple were at his side through some of his most difficult times – including his fall-out with Cheryl.
He would often stay at their home as they battled to keep him sober.
‘Liam adored Denise,’ says a source. ‘She mothered him and really tried to support him.’
Yet in recent months, his life was clearly spiralling out of control. His on-off girlfriend, Maya Henry, 23, had recently hired lawyers to send a ‘cease and desist’ letter to the star, accusing him of repeatedly contacting her and her loved ones.
Liam’s friends insisted he was angry and upset at her, adding that her behaviour was due to her wanting to publicise her new book.
And only last week, I’m told Liam had a huge row with his manager over his forthcoming album, whose release – to Liam’s fury – had been delayed because it was deemed ‘too poppy’.
A source said: ‘There was a blazing row and the album was put back again. The single from it had flopped and there were concerns. Liam desperately wanted that album to come out: despite everything, he thought of himself as a musician.’
To make matters even worse, just a few days ago Liam’s record label dropped him.
Another source said: ‘People begged him to get help and suggested that he went to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings, but he wouldn’t take them up on it.’
His most recent girlfriend was Texan model Katie Cassidy, whom he thought might have been The One. She too had tried to help him, but left Argentina to return to the US two days before he died.
‘Lots of people cared for Liam,’ said a source. ‘He had so much love around him.’
Yet all the love in the world was not enough to rescue this desperately unhappy young man, who for all his fame and fortune could never escape the demons that haunted him from his lost, tormented youth.
