On Wednesday night, fans were rocked by news that Liam Payne had died.
Payne, 31, died in Argentina after police were called to the hotel in which he was staying. The singer had been behaving erratically; in a call to the emergency services, hotel workers said that he had “had too many drugs and alcohol and, well, when he is conscious, he is trashing the entire room.”
When they arrived, they found Payne had fallen off the third-floor balcony of his hotel room.
In a statement, Alberto Crescenti, head of the Buenos Aires’ public emergency medical services, said that he fell around 14 metres and suffered “very serious injuries incompatible with life.”
Payne shot to fame in boyband One Direction in 2010 after being paired with Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Harry Styles in competition The X Factor. He was only 16 at the time, and in interviews he gave afterwards he was open about the impact fame had on his mental health.
As early as 2019, he told Men’s Heath Australia that he had found his newfound success difficult to deal with and often reached for alcohol as a way to cope.
“It's almost like putting the Disney costume on before you step up on stage and underneath the Disney costume I was pissed quite a lot of the time because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on,” he said.
“I mean, it was fun. We had an absolute blast, but there were certain parts of it where it just got a little bit toxic.”
That toxicity was addressed in more detail on his infamous interview with YouTuber Logan Paul in 2022, in which Payne described how he almost “came to blows” with another bandmate backstage.
“There was one moment where there was an argument backstage and one member, in particular, threw me up a wall. So I said to him, ‘If you don’t remove those hands there’s a high likelihood you’ll never use them again'," he said.
He also added that there were “many reasons” he disliked former bandmate Zayn Malik, and that he and Louis Tomlinson had originally “hated each other” before becoming friends.
That interview was widely mocked by fans and commentators, but it gives an insight into Payne’s mind at the time – and he addressed those comments a few years later, saying those comments had been made in a "scramble to stay relevant". He also confessed that though he regretted what he’d said, it was a "life-changing moment, that saved my life in a way."
Payne was also open about his struggles in dealing with substance abuse.
Speaking on the Diary of a CEO podcast in 2021, Payne told host Stephen Bartlett that he had struggled with “severe suicidal thoughts” and heavy drug use while he was in the band.
“I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be,” he said in the interview. “Where's rock bottom for me? And you would never have seen it. I'm very good at hiding it. No one would ever have seen it.
“There is some stuff that I have definitely never, never spoken about… it was really, really, really severe. And it was a problem. And it was only until I saw myself after that, I was like ‘Right, I need to fix myself.’”
During the interview, Payne also talked about seeing pictures of himself on a boat looking “all bloated out” with what he called his “pills-and-booze face.”
“My face was just, like, 10 times more than it is now. I just didn't like myself very much, and then I made a change,” he said, adding that when he was in One Direction, he used to down the contents of the hotel minibars that the band’s managers would check them into to avoid fans. “The day the band ended, I was like, 'Thank the Lord.’ I know a lot of people are going to be mad at me for saying that, but I needed to stop or it would kill me."
He followed that up with an announcement in July 2023 that he had just spent 100 days in a rehab facility in Louisiana, to get help for his struggles with alcohol.
“Turning the phone back on was a little bit scary,” he said in a video to his fans. “I've been trying to learn to get to know this new guy.”
He added that his former One Direction bandmates had “stuck by me” and “came to my rescue”, as well as his former girlfriend Cheryl for her support.
Despite that, Payne’s ex-fiancee Maya Henry also described how Payne’s mental health had nose dived in recent weeks. She issued a cease and desist in the week leading up to his death, and in a recent TikTok video said that Payne would “blow up her phone” with messages after they broke up.
“It’s always from different phone numbers too, so I never know where it’s gonna come from,” she added. “He’ll create new iCloud accounts to message me – it’s always a new damn iCloud account. Every time I see one pop up on my phone I’m like, ‘here we f***ing go again.’
“Also, he will email me… not only me, but he’ll blow up my mom’s phone. Is this normal behaviour to you?”
