When I met him, he was the member of the band with a portable PlayStation suitcase setup, on which they all played FIFA and Medal of Honor during long tour-bus rides. One Direction were a new band, and Liam Payne was about to turn 19. In the spring of 2012, I spent a few days hanging out with the group for a potential Rolling Stone cover story that never came to fruition. Over the years, we’ve released a few interviews from that reporting. Here’s my solo conversation with the singer — who died Wednesday at 31 — conducted on the phone a couple weeks after our first meeting.
What are you gonna do when you get back home? What’s your plan?
I’m going to the Bahamas and then I’m going… When is this going to come out?
Probably really fast. In about three weeks.
Ok. I didn’t want you to put in where I was going to be.
Don’t worry about it, you’ll be out of the Bahamas before anyone knows about it.
Oh, thank God.
Your dad is a really nice guy. I got to talk to him a little bit. What was it like hanging out with him in New York?
It was good. When I started doing this when I was 14, my dad used to drive me everywhere and make my CDs. He was, like, the main driving force and probably the biggest reason why I made it into the band, because he used to help me out with what I wanted to do even if it seemed like a crazy idea at the time. Even though it seemed so far away, he always believed in what I was gonna do, so it’s good to finally have something to show for what we did in those two years.
So you really kind of saw this in your future?
Yeah. Well, not this kind of success. My main aim was just to get live shows, but I wasn’t sure what happened after them. I went to music college and studied music for a little bit; I thought I had to go away and learn a little bit about music and how it works rather than just go there blind not knowing anything at all. And it helped me out a lot in performing live when we got to the final stages [of The X Factor].
If you hadn’t made it past the first round of The X Factor, what do you think you’d be doing now?
I wanted to be a fireman, so I probably would’ve gone to do that.
You wanted to be a fireman? That takes some bravery.
Yeah. I always wanted to be a fireman, since I was a little kid.
This is kind of an easier job than that.
Yeah. The reason I wanted to be a fireman was, I went one day to the local fire station and they parked the fire truck outside and they were playing tennis where the fire trucks usually are. It looked like fun to save people and then come back and play tennis.
Were you a happy kid growing up?
It was fine. It was just normal. We used to go on holiday to America every year and had a good time. It was good growing up, the only problem was that we never did anything to our house, so we always lived in a very small house and my room was so small. That was the only thing that I didn’t like about my childhood: my house. My room was very small and tiny.
What was the first big purchase you made with your One Direction cash?
For all of us, the first thing that we did was we went out and spoiled our families and stuff, so we all bought our families cars. I bought my dad a nice car because he needed one and I just bought my family a house as well.
That’s nice. A bigger one I guess.
Yeah. My dad helped me for many years while I was trying to do this, so now I’m trying to give something back.
Have you thought about making a solo album someday?
No, not at all. I enjoy being in a band too much to ever go back to being on a stage by myself. It’s such different vibes with your bandmates and all the traveling and stuff that goes along with it. You just enjoy it a lot more. There’s a lot more fun to come out of it, rather than being stuck on the road by yourself.
It’s wild how much your schedule is booked for next year. What’s it like to know that your life is mapped out for a year or more?
We always say that when you were outside of the band, you didn’t plan past the weekend and now you’ve got your whole life planned out for like two years. It’s strange, but it’s good to know that you’re gonna be busy. A lot of people are not very busy and, fortunately for us, we’re very busy. We get to tour the world and see a lot of new places and next time there will be a lot more time off for us, so we can go ahead and actually see the places. There’s so much promo involved that we kind of just do work all the time.
If you guys are twice as big this time next year, can you imagine what that would be like?
It’s so hard to imagine, let alone gain more fans…it’s very difficult to actually picture those sort of things. I’m a bit worried, actually, about when we go home, because we’ve had a lot of success in America, so we’ve been in the media a lot more at home, so I wonder if more people will recognize us. It’s quite a scary thought, but it’s a nice scary thought. It’s a lovely position to be in, so who knows.
In New York, you guys were able to sneak out if you weren’t together, right?
Yup. When you’re alone you can walk on the street because people don’t really…
But that could change and you could lose that freedom.
Yeah. That would be scary. It’s quite nice to be able to go down the street and buy some milk or whatever. I don’t want that to change too much, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
When you guys are alone, do you ever say, “What the hell is happening in our lives? This is really crazy.”
All the time. Literally, I sat down a few weeks ago and we talked through everything — because I think it’s important to talk about these sort of things, to understand them and what they mean to your own work. Because now that we broke the records in America, it’s such a huge thing.
It’s possible that it won’t really sink in until about three years from now.
Yeah. Completely. I do believe that, actually, that we don’t really fully understand it, and that our parents don’t really know what’s going on.
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