I have very fond memories of family holidays as a kid, I was always up to something, never sitting still, great fun! (cont. over the page...)
It wasn’t all baby food and coin-throwing, of course. I used to get paid quite well sometimes. I remember getting £350 for six minutes’ work at one show, which for a 14-year-old lad felt pretty amazing! And, of course, as a lot of people know, I was lucky enough to sing ‘Black & Gold’ at Wolverhampton Wanderers’ stadium one time. They can fit nearly 30,000 people in that bad boy and, because it was before their game against Man Utd, the ground was rammed. I was really nervous but I got a great round of applause, which was a relief because I wasn’t sure how a football crowd would react to some kid coming out and singing. Mind you, I didn’t tell them I was a Baggies fan!
By the time I entered The X Factor the first time, aged 14, I really fancied performing as a career. My dad had always said, ‘I want Simon Cowell to hear your voice, Liam. We just need to get you in front of Simon ...’ So when they dropped the age restriction to 14, I was on that website filling in the form quick as a flash. It all looks pretty manageable on the telly in a way, but actually you need guts to have a pop at The X Factor. I was only a kid, so it was a huge step to try to get in the competition, queue for hours and hours, then actually set foot on the stage when you know you’re about to sing for Simon and the judges. And then the day itself – getting up early, making my slot, keeping the nerves under control and not crumbling – that was all a big ask. I just kept reminding myself how much I enjoyed singing and harnessed the feeling that I wanted to show the judges what I could do.
I was a very keen amateur runner in my childhood and had ambitions to represent England.
My hopes of becoming Wolverhampton’s first ever quad bike world champion were destined to fail.
Singing was a constant in my life from an early age. I loved performing as often as I possibly could – still do!
With one of several running trophies I managed to win as a junior.
At the O2 for Boot Camp the first time I tried out for The X Factor.
It was gutting to lose out at Judges’ Houses, of course, but I tried to console myself with the fact that I’d got to the last 24 out of 118,000. Plus Simon had said I was talented, which was hugely encouraging. The whole experience was pretty intense for a 14-year-old, and I actually think that if I’d done well as a solo singer in that first X Factor, I’m not sure how it would have panned out for me afterwards. I certainly can’t see how it would have competed with One Direction. I was still gutted at the time, of course. But after I’d licked my wounds, the experience focused my mind on just how much I wanted to make a go of my singing. ‘Come on, Dad, let’s book some more gigs. I want to get back out there again straight away ...’
After that, me and Dad took it really seriously. We upped the number of gigs I was playing, tried to get the word out there and started making a few contacts in the industry. I even started to write a few songs, although I’m not sure they’ll make it onto the new One Direction album! I can actually remember the very first song I ever wrote – it was kinda like a Spiderman soundtrack. I still have it on my laptop and it’s not a bad song, to be fair. I went to a recording studio that was literally just this geezer’s house and we did the recording in the back room. That doesn’t sound very glamorous but, with a lot of One Direction’s songs being written on the road, it’s not so very different to how we end up recording much of the band’s music!
We made a few inroads with people who appeared to be well positioned to help, but we just seemed to keep coming to dead-ends and things falling through at the last minute. I was gigging pretty constantly and writing a few songs with people who took them to record labels ... but nothing happened. One geezer I was working with just upped and went off to Hawaii, so that all fell apart. I went to so many gigs that turned out to be disappointments. I did that first solo shot at The X Factor, which stalled at Judges’ Houses. And then, as you know, two years later I went to The X Factor again ... and, once again, it didn’t go well and I was rejected as a solo artist.
Only this time it wasn’t over, was it?
The entire X Factor experience was obviously a pivotal moment in my life and I honestly look back on it with only great memories. Yes, it was hard work and it was certainly very nerve-wracking on occasions, but how can you reflect on that experience and see anything other than fantastic times? And what an opportunity it gave us five lads.
We’ve all spoken about being on The X Factor so many times but to be frank it now feels like a world away. It feels so, so long ago. When we were on the show, we were just concentrating on enjoying ourselves and having a good time. There were a lot of contestants who were very serious about the competition, which is fair enough, and there was a little bit of cattiness backstage ... but we were chillin’ and we were friends with everyone, more or less. You all already know about my dreadful disappointment at being rejected and then the intense, overwhelming excitement of being put into a band with these four other lads, but even to this day that moment when they revealed they were putting us into One Direction is still just the most amazing memory. Hard to believe, really!
Back then we used to offend so many people with our, I guess what you’d call, vulgar language. But we didn’t see that – we were just kids having a good time. We’d be sat doing some interview – or just backstage or out and about somewhere – and the jokes would start escalating, then eventually one of us would cross a line and I’d be like, ‘I can’t believe you said that!’, but I’d be laughing my head off at the same time. Our level of professionalism was horrible. When we first came off the show, the very next day we had to go straight into Syco for a telling off! It was about something we’d said that was just funny – I can’t repeat what it was. We were like, ‘We didn’t mean any harm!’ We were just typical teenage lads who liked to go out, have a good time and mess about! At this point I was really sensible compared with the other lads, proper shy, really, and I used to keep the banter levels down a bit. I’d be like, ‘I think we’ve overstepped the mark there, lads!’ or I’d tell them if I thought they’d been too vulgar. That’s why I got the nickname of ‘Daddy Direction’.
Now we’re a few albums in we’d like to think we know a little bit about the music industry, but back then, jeez, we knew absolutely nothing! It’s bizarre to think that we were thrown in so deep, so quickly. Even basic things like moving to London were a massive deal. ‘Hey, Mum, I’m coming home for a bit ’cos I’m moving to London next week and I need to pack everything’ – it was literally that mad. I was 17 years old at the time and had to move out of my parents’ house to this huge city, somewhere I’d only been a couple of times with my dad for recording. So it was pretty scary, ’cos I didn’t really know what to expect from the capital. When I was a kid my dad used to say to me, ‘Liam, if you get through on X Factor, don’t come back until Christmas.’
Well, I haven’t moved back since.
Those first few months of One Direction were just a blur. It was madness, really weird, but we went with it and loved every second. When you’re that young and inexperienced, you don’t really know what the heck is going on. People are like, ‘This is where you’re going to live, we’ll pay for this, we’ll do this for you but you have to pay for that, then you need to go into work on that day ...’ It all moves so fast, it’s insane.
You really don’t know what’s happening. The X Factor is more or less like watching a band with a development deal but right in front of the nation every week. That was One Direction. We started off in full public view and it’s never really changed since.
We were going into interviews and saying all sorts of stuff, just honest, funny, straight answers. Luckily, the newspapers were really good to us. They didn’t take advantage of our inexperience and really helped us along in those early days. We were so terrible it was awful! We were just kids, so naïve, who’d literally been dropped into this massive industry that will eat you alive i
f you do it wrong. And we were doing everything wrong! Yet somehow it seemed to work. People wanted to talk to us, find out about our music, get to know us. Something was going on ... we must have had some sort of Guardian Angel.
In some sense, that Guardian Angel was our fans. Even before we’d signed a record deal, social media around the band was going nuts. We all had various accounts before the band was formed, but it quickly became apparent after the show that something was going on out there. I’m deeply appreciative of that fanbase working so hard on social media – it’s such a huge deal for us and a massive part of our story. I personally think it started when people saw us on X Factor YouTube videos and there was ‘#OneDirection’ posted, which started being one of the top ten trending topics in the UK most weeks. People began re-tweeting and we were just watching this start to blow up right before our eyes. There was an army of fans out there promoting and championing the band. We were all like, ‘This is crazy! How brilliant is that?’
Right from the word go we gigged hard too. When we started off playing those very early shows it was going OK, but management have always been nervous about when we go on stage, because we’re just too laid back about things. There’d be some really important show or appearance and they’d (quite rightly) say stuff like, ‘This is a big gig, a real opportunity to showcase the band, OK?’ and we’d be like, ‘Yeah, great, let’s have a crack at it!’ We were rough around the edges at times, but there were some great gigs back then and we were just having an amazing time giving it a go. We started in Scotland, doing a couple of gigs on the club circuit up there. The first gig was really good. I remember very clearly being on a small stage in this very hot room full of about 300 people. Even before we started singing the security were dragging girls out of the audience because they were fainting. I remember thinking, That’s a bit odd. We were on stage trying to be all happy, and I could see girls crying and screaming ’cos they were getting crushed. It was baffling, to be honest.
One of the next gigs was in Leeds and there happened to be a lot of lads in the club that night. There were all these girls’ screams that went on for a certain length of time and then you’d hear these boos underneath. I kept winking at this one girl, and then I realised she was there with her boyfriend and he was getting proper riled up! We played all over the place, even in places like G.A.Y., which we clearly weren’t old enough to go to ourselves. However, we all felt this was our groundwork, as it were, and we knew it was important to put the miles in. I was just drawing on my experience of gigs from before the band, and kept saying to the lads, ‘These gigs are like our apprenticeship and this is how we prove ourselves as a band. We’ve had the most amazing headstart, but this is when it is really going to count.’ The amount of promo and PAs, the X Factor tour, hundreds of photo-shoots – the workload was massive. At the same time there was also a huge element of luck: right place, right time, with the right technology available to make it happen, to introduce One Direction to the rest of the world.
Of course, it wasn’t all luck and people being friendly to us. Our record label did a great job at the start, finding us brilliant talent to write the songs for us. That soon became apparent when we started recording sessions for the début album. When we were recording ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ at our first studio session in Sweden, we’d tweeted some studio bits and pieces and these two girls came down on a train from miles away to where we were in Stockholm. We hadn’t even got a record out at that point. Once the fanbase had music to go along with all this social media interest as well, it just kicked off big time.
The first album sessions themselves were interesting! Flying to LA and Sweden was very exciting, of course, particularly the West Coast of America, which to us five seemed like such a glamorous location. Flash hotels, big recording studios, famous producers – it was all so much to take in. To be really honest, there was a bit of ‘discussion’, shall we say, with the label about the song choices. They wanted different things to what we initially wanted, but in the end it did go the right way, the way that it should have done.
We kinda got told how to sing a little bit on that album, as the people we were working with had a very particular way of doing things. We’re much more loose about it now, but they were very exact about our pronunciation, getting all the ‘S’s and the ‘T’s correct. I’d sing a line that was bang in tune and sounded great, and the producers would say, ‘Can you do that again, please? We just need a little more clarity on the last word, it has to be perfect ...’ It was all very intricate and precise. And let’s face it, what they did worked. There was a learning curve for us five in the band, but we were learning off top industry people. We got on well with everyone in the studio and built up friendships with them, but we were so naïve to that environment; it kinda felt like we were still on The X Factor so we just went with it like that.
By the time our début single ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ came out in September 2011 there was intense interest in the band. So that first release was a huge moment for us. The song had to do well and I don’t mind admitting I was a bit nervous about it. I said to the one of the lads, I think it was Louis, ‘I don’t like the drum roll before the chorus kicks in … I’m not sure about that,’ but the producers knew exactly what they were doing, because sure enough it was a massive song, amazing for us. Being Number 1 was an incredible feeling, but there was no time to reflect on that achievement as we were just straight on to the next thing. Once that was out and had done well, the momentum just kept mounting and mounting.
Our début album Up All Night was released at the start of December and, even with all the massive PR we were getting, none of us expected the record to do as well as it did: Number 2 in the UK and topping the charts in 17 countries! Madness! We were bemused, to be honest. We’d be sitting in the the tour bus or in a studio and someone would phone us to say we’d hit Number 1 in yet another country, and we’d be like, ‘Is this for real?’ It was the most incredible time.
Again, there was barely a moment’s pause before we were straight on to the next thing, with no chance to soak up the news. For starters, we had our first headline tour lined up around UK theatres to support the album. Despite all the craziness at that point in our careers, we didn’t rush anything in terms of huge gigs: we didn’t try to play multiple nights at the O2 straight away, or say, ‘Come on, people have slept in the street for three days for tickets, why don’t we play Wembley Arena?’ We didn’t say that. There were a few pretty big venues on that tour, to be fair, but generally we just wanted to take our time and progress as naturally as possible. I’d say to the lads, ‘Remember what we agreed? We need to learn our craft, play the smaller stages, work our way up from the bottom. We have to respect the process.’
For example, the second-ever night of One Direction headlining live we sang the entire chorus of ‘Gotta Be You’ completely out of tune because we didn’t really know what we were doing with the wedges or the in-ears. We were all like, ‘Oh my God, it was awful!’ AWFUL! I dread to think what some of those people in the audience thought. They must have definitely turned their backs on us for ever! We were terrible. We were naïve and didn’t really know what was going on – some of us still don’t know today! But that was just a phase of us learning, and you’ve gotta be bad sometimes in order to get good. There’s always a learning curve. That said, we were getting such a reaction it was incredible. The venues were quite modest and so the fans were right in our faces. I’d be trying to sing, and the fans would be screaming and shouting, ‘Liam! Liam!’ so loud it hurt ... Those were great times.
The spotlight was pretty intense that Christmas, as the tour did well and our album kept hitting Number 1 in various countries. That was weird. Good weird! We were scheduled to head over to the US shortly after the New Year, expectations were positive, and we were all really excited and hoped that maybe a few of the kids out there had heard of us.
We arrived in the States to start our campaign in February 2012, having signed
a US record deal the previous autumn. We got a massive break straight away by being offered a slot opening up for Big Time Rush, who at the time had their own TV show and were massive. What we didn’t realise was the scale of the reaction we were about to get ourselves! One time we were on our way to an interview and I said to Harry, ‘Do you think these people will have a clue who we are?’ How wide of the mark can you be?
That support tour was proper nuts. Each night we went on stage early doors but we immediately noticed the whole audience was already in the venue. Strange. Before the very first Big Time Rush show I’d been worried about going up on stage because I’m the so-called ‘hype man’ – so I’ll stand there and coax everyone to sing the words and join in – but I was just assuming that nobody would know any of our songs, never mind any of the words. How wrong can you be? By the second song of the very first gig it was apparent that they knew every word of every song! I walked across the stage to Zayn and said, ‘Is it just me or do these guys know every single lyric?! This is mad!’ We also noticed that after we’d finished, loads of fans would leave the venue to come out and meet us. Those shows were amazing. We were just bewildered, really, as no one ever expected that sort of reaction in the States.
The single did pretty well over in the US, but social media was going nuts by now and we were aware that there was a strong interest in the band. Then we were booked to do the Today show in New York, which is a really big institution over there. I remember it being absolutely freezing, proper New York cold, and we’d been getting reports on the radio that a lot of people had turned up. I was like, ‘Great! How many? A good few hundred, maybe?’ Management were obviously getting more detailed figures because they’d be smiling and saying stuff like, ‘Er, no, Liam, it’s more than a few hundred ... ’ We just didn’t know – this was New York, not London, after all. We walked out on to the street to perform, and when we climbed up on to the stage and saw the full scale of the crowd for the first time it was a big shock. Turned out that 10,000 people had rocked up!
One Direction: Who We Are: Our Official Autobiography Page 2