Liam Payne has finally explained the reason for his baffling accent in a viral clip.
The former One Direction singer, 28, was interviewed by Good Morning Britain on the red carpet at the Elton John Foundation Oscars party in March and asked for his take on the infamous Will Smith slap.
But fans were left puzzled as the Wolverhampton-born artist aired his opinion in a strange accent that sounded like an Irish, American and Welsh fusion.
The singer finally addressed the viral clip in an Instagram live video on Monday night.
“I’m good at accents, I pride myself on them!” he told his fans. “I just wish sometimes I could do my own.
“It was quite funny. I had asked the Good Morning Britain presenter, ‘Please don’t ask me too much because I’ve had a lot to drink and I’m under-ly educated about the Oscars’. The very first question the man asked me was, ‘What do you think about Will Smith?’.”
“Now can you imagine being put on the spot in that moment and knowing, ‘I can’t say anything wrong because I’m gonna upset someone’?” he added, insisting he “just did the best I could”.
“I actually read back what I said and I stand by what I said,” Payne said. “I’m just sorry it came out in so many accents!”
Offering an explanation for his baffling accent, Payne added: “To tell you the truth, I was staying in a house with two German people, three people from Texas, one person from Liverpool and me. It sounded like one of those jokes people say about an Irishman and an Englishman walk into a pub – and that’s what came out.
“So, you know… what can I say? But it was funny, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, don’t have so many drinks and address the country,” he concluded.
During the original interview Payne threw a word soup as he chatted: “Will Smith used to live behind my house, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing his son and his daughter. I believe whatever he felt that he did, he had the right to do. There were three losers in one fight."
He then said the slap cut him "really deep" and referred to Smith as "one of the world’s best emoters ever", before concluding: "I’d rather take the beauty out of the situation than take the pain."
