One Direction: Who We Are: Our Official Autobiography
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The Rockefeller Plaza stage was on the street in between all these massive skyscrapers. It’s a really picturesque location and there were loads of American flags waving around above us, so as you glance around the chaos you suddenly remember you’re in the States. It was completely crazy. This was our American national TV début and here we were showing up on a red London bus to play to that many people. Afterwards we found out that we’d broken the record for the show. I’m pretty sure it was held by Lady Gaga, and let’s face it she’s one of pop’s biggest icons, the closest thing we’ve had to another Madonna for this generation. So for us to be on a similar scale to these sort of people at that stage was just like, ‘Good times!’
The album had débuted at Number 1 in multiple countries by then, so all eyes were on how high we could get in the US. With all the hype around the band, the album was brought forward a week – but even then none of us had any idea of what was about to happen. Early on in the week we had a meeting with the record label and management to see how things were going, and they said, ‘Look, lads. There’s a chance the album could chart very high, but the competition this week is severe and to have any chance of a big chart entry we need to raise our game.’ So we did. We took on mountains of extra promo. I remember staying up until stupid o’clock in the morning signing 5,000 CDs while doing a load of press interviews. We left no stone unturned. We put in two extra book signings when we were supposed to be chillin’ and having downtime, but we wanted that Number 1 so bad. That would be our calling card: to be able to say our album was Number 1 in the States. We totally worked our arses off that week, going round so many places to make it work.
At the end of the week I was sitting in a yellow New York cab when my phone rang. It was our manager, Will. ‘Liam, I’ve got some news, the album’s charted as a new entry straight in at Number 1!’ I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I got straight out of the cab and went and bought myself a new watch to celebrate the occasion! That’s a little ritual I have now: every time we do something cool I buy a nice watch to commemorate the achievement. I thought about getting a tattoo each time, but as we’ve been lucky enough to have so many hits I’d be completely covered by now! If I do have kids when I’m older I’ll be able to give the watches to them and explain the story behind each one.
To be totally frank with you, none of us were fully aware of the significance of hitting Number 1 in the US with our début album. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we knew it was BIG, but it wasn’t until a few weeks later when it had sunk in that we started to realise exactly what it meant. The Beatles had never done it. The Rolling Stones, Take That, Coldplay – all these massive bands had never managed to get their début album to hit Number 1. How crazy is that? That’s also a record that can’t be broken because it was a first, which I love.
Everything went completely nuts from that moment on. Proper nuts! Whatever we thought was mad before the album came out was just a fraction of how insane it was about to become.
We’re often asked why our album went to Number 1 in the US and why it all went so nuts. I think there are several reasons. For starters, I think it helped that we were just having a great time, and perhaps people enjoyed watching that. Like I said, we didn’t know the history behind the Billboard charts. Honestly, I didn’t really know jack about music when we started. I loved singing and performing, but I just used to do covers and didn’t know anything about music history. I do now – I listen to all sorts of music from way back, check out the charts and keep right up to speed with everything. Back then, though, I was so naïve about it all. I wonder if that was a plus for us? In a way, we never took it seriously and people seemed to like that endearing side of us – that we were like, ‘Hey, we’re just having a laugh! This is great!’ People kinda liked the fact we weren’t overly serious about it, that we were just having a good time and dressing like normal lads from round the corner.
I also think we had good songs that were really well written and expertly produced. Adele had certainly opened a lot of doors for British acts over there too. The Big Time Rush tour was a lucky break. Plus, we did work stupid hard. We really went for it. Our American marketing team was amazing, and last but not least you cannot discount the huge power of the internet, in particular our amazing fans and what they did for us on social media. That was crucial. But honestly, I don’t really know. It just kicked off. What I do know is it went fast and it went BIG.
The rest of 2012 was a mad blur, to be honest.
We flew back from America in February for the Brit Awards, where we somehow won ‘Single of the Year’ for our début song. Since then we’ve luckily won a fair few awards, but awards ceremonies are a bit weird sometimes. I remember the first VMA win – that was a big night and one of my fondest memories of the early days. It felt so important to get that recognition in the States.
The first Brit Awards were a big deal for us too. I’ve watched those programmes since I was a kid and I’ve always thought, I wonder what it’s actually like, the moment they say you’ve won? The only problem we had that night was that back in the day I was known as the responsible one, so in the dressing room beforehand one of our managers, Richard Griffiths, handed me a blue sheet of paper and said, ‘Here are all the people it would be great for you to thank if we win.’ So when they opened the envelope and shouted out, ‘And the winner is ...’ I was like, ‘YES!’ then I was like, ‘Oh crap, the list!’ I’d never done a speech before, and when I got up there the sound was bouncing off the walls and I was struggling to hear myself. I slowed my words down to get round this, which didn’t really work – so it was just a mess. I got all the names right, though!
It was quite funny because at that first Brits we were kinda jeered a little bit by a lot of British artists because we’d come from The X Factor and people were sceptical about us. It was funny seeing that dynamic change at later awards ceremonies over the next few years, and it’s nice to have a bit of respect for having worked hard and achieved success as a British band overseas. One award I would like to mention was handed out at the ‘Sons & Daughters’ award ceremony in my hometown of Wolverhampton in late 2013. The ceremony recognised local people who the judges felt had made a mark for the city around the world in various ways, so I was absolutely over the moon when I was nominated and then subsequently won an award. Unfortunately I couldn’t be there because we were touring Down Under, but Mum and Dad went to pick up the award for me. I did a video message and was just so incredibly proud: ‘My band has picked up a lot of awards over the past few years, but for me this is the one I’m definitely most grateful for. Wolverhampton’s my home and it always will be. I want to say a massive thank you to all those people years ago who gave me the opportunities I needed to get me where I am today ... It’s definitely the most important award. It’s going to take pride of place on my shelf.’
Awards ceremonies can be quite odd nights out, but thankfully we’ve been lucky enough to scoop quite a few gongs at them!
During the Big Time Rush tour it had become apparent that our band was bigger than the venues we were playing. Then, with the album’s success and all the media interest, the demand for live shows became enormous. So in April we started our own headline tour of Australia and then North America. There was a big buzz around us at the time, and even though there was a lot of pressure in those early days it just seemed to flow together into one mad time. We almost forgot where we were sometimes as it all didn’t seem very real. Luckily, we didn’t have any bad audiences – everywhere we went we got a great reaction. It was absolutely amazing to be touring round North America for our own shows and we were loving being on the road. It was just us and our tour manager Paul, mostly, crammed into this shady bus that seemed to be stuck together with bits of tape. The shows kept selling out and the tour kept getting extended, so we eventually ended up doing over 60 shows. Interspersed in among all this was more TV, such as iCarly and Saturday Night Live, and the madness just kept ramping up and up and up.
We were still finding our feet in the industry too, so it wasn’t always plain sailing. We used to find that before shows everybody around us would be nervous. Management and the crew would sometimes say, ‘Are you OK, guys? Everything all right for tonight?’ You know, they were just being protective and making sure we were OK. But we were often the most relaxed of all, us five lads. We’d be like, ‘We’re just here to have a good time!’ I think that’s more or less what got us through and stopped us crumbling from thinking too much about it. We just carried on with our jobs – we had work to do. If we had forced ourselves to sit down and analyse every bit of success – ‘Why are we Number 1 in America? How have we sold this many tickets? Why do the fans overseas like us so much?’ – all that stuff, we’d most probably have caved in. Having a laugh was, in retrospect, a really good coping mechanism for processing the most bizarre events going on around us ... but at the time it wasn’t that calculated, it was just what we were doing naturally. The fact that it helped us relieve the pressure was just an added bonus. We had a right laugh, carrying on having fun with it, not really thinking about all these records and statistics we were being told about. We never really dwelled on these until after we’d finished. Then we were like, ‘Blimey, lads, it looks like we smashed it out there!’
2012 was a massive year for the UK because of the London Olympics, which we were absolutely honoured to be invited to perform at. That was a huge deal for all of us. As a child athlete, I’d often said to my dad, ‘I’ll make the Olympics!’ – and now I finally had! The line-up of artists involved was amazing and we met a lot of them before the closing ceremony, people like Madness, the Spice Girls and Russell Brand. We performed on the back of this truck, but I didn’t care where we sang from, it was such an honour to represent our country around the world. It felt like being called up for an England game – the England game of pop stars. It was huge! The Games were such a hugely proud moment for me to do something so prestigious.
One interviewer asked me, ‘Now that you’ve enjoyed so much success, have you started to re-set your goals? Are you all looking for new ambitions?’ but to be perfectly honest the answer is no. We were still kinda just going along with it, having a laugh, taking each day as it came and working as hard as we could. I honestly think a lot of the time things seemed to fall into our laps. I would sometimes say to people, ‘We didn’t aim to play the Olympics, we just got asked,’ or ‘We didn’t dream we’d play to thousands of people in a street in New York, it just happened.’ Obviously, our team in the US and all round the world worked amazingly hard, and they had plans and strategies, of course, I’d never deny that. But in terms of us five lads, we were just riding that wave and it was the best time.
The rest of 2012 was just mad. We released some more singles and won some MTV awards, and all the time we were doing promo and gigs – it was pretty relentless. In the first half of the year we also started working on the second album, and this time we got a bit more involved with the writing. We were aware we’d set a huge benchmark with the previous album, so there was definitely a lot of pressure on us to match what had happened with Up All Night, plus we wanted to develop the music to make it better. That said, the album was still essentially in the record label’s hands, plus the people writing the songs. We had a certain amount of say in where we wanted to take it but we were certainly not the chief songwriters. Luckily, the songs came in great and I remember feeling very good about the new record at the time. We didn’t record much of the material on the road, and there was still quite a bit of conventional studio time in Sweden and London. It was a little bit easier, although there were still a lot of interviews and promo to be done, and there was always something going on while we were recording.
If we thought it was mad with the first album, the second record, Take Me Home, just took things on to a whole new level. ‘Live While We’re Young’ had been the lead single, and that had done well, so we knew there was still a lot of interest. I did feel pressure to make a good follow-up but that just made us work even harder. Even so, when we heard the chart news in the first week of release we were all shocked. The new album hit Number 1 in 31 countries – it was just madness! It’s always amazing to get Number 1 in the UK – and we did the same again in the States, another world record. Everywhere we went now it was a frenzy, just sheer chaos. I kept thinking about the album tour and I just couldn’t wait to get out there to see all the fans that had made this possible. I still find it incredible that we have so many fans in so many countries – the global scale of what has happened is quite hard to take in, to be honest. In our interviews, one of the most repeated sentences I say must be: ‘I can’t believe the reception we’ve got in this country.’ It genuinely never ceases to amaze me.
The month after the second album came out we played what is perhaps our most iconic gig to date, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. When we’d been working so hard during the week of our début album’s release, Steve Barnett from our label Columbia (a Wolves fan!) had said, ‘If you get Number 1 with this album then you’re going to play Madison Square Garden!’ He just put it like that. I was like, ‘Woah! Don’t be daft, Steve!’ But then we did get Number 1 and, sure enough, true to his word, Steve booked us to play MSG. I was properly worried, saying to the other lads, ‘Do you think we might have overstepped the mark? It’s such a huge and legendary venue ...’ I thought we might have over-reached ourselves too early. So imagine how it felt when someone from the record label phoned us and said, ‘Lads, the MSG has sold out in less than one minute.’ That’s 20,000+ tickets. It seemed ludicrous. We were just these young guns off the street ... yet we’d sold out the Garden in a heartbeat. These things just don’t happen. That venue is such a prestigious building, and it wrapped up 2012 so perfectly because after the show we had this big party with all our friends, family and everyone involved in One Direction together to celebrate what had been a ridiculous 12 months.
The X Factor was such a bubble and then with One Direction going so massive so quickly it was in many ways another bubble of mad events and crazy schedules. I can see how easy it would be for someone to kinda lose perspective. Well, in February 2013 we got involved with Comic Relief and a trip to Ghana, and if ever there was a leveller, this was it.
To say it was quite an eye-opener is the understatement of the century. These were two very important days for me personally. We did have a nice hotel to stay in, there’s no lie about that. I’m not gonna pretend we roughed it, because we didn’t. There’s a big rich–poor divide in Ghana, so it’s not like there are no posh hotels. However, the poverty is just appalling. It was only a two-day trip but we spent 15 hours in a slum, which was easily enough for us to get a picture of that life. Can you imagine living there the whole time?
On one side of this slum was a rubbish tip and on the other side were all these little shacks, literally just 50 yards away from the mountain of rubbish. The smell was horrific, and the wind was blowing that stench and all the dirt across into these shacks. I noticed a smell of burning plastic. I asked what it was, and they told me people would scavenge in the rubbish to find electrical cables, then burn off the plastic coating and sell the wire underneath for 30p a day.
They took me and Harry into this little tent where they were having a naming ceremony for a tiny baby. Considering where she was living, she was actually dressed in some nice white clothes – they’d somehow got her some lovely things to wear. She was lying on a single mattress on the floor inside the tent and we went in to meet her dad. He shook our hands, then turned to Harry and said, ‘Please, please take my baby away with you. She needs a better lif
e. Please take her away from here.’ I was just gutted. It was really hard. In fact it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to listen to in my life. I just couldn’t deal with it.
We also met a guy who’d been trained to be a cook with money raised by Comic Relief. He was only making outdoor street food, but he was cooking nonetheless and providing for the whole community – as well as earning a wage – as a result of the training. That’s the only way things are gonna change there.
The whole Ghana trip was a reality check, big time. When you’ve seen stuff like that it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself on a long bus journey away from your family on the way to another sold-out gig.
When I think of the scale of our second album tour it’s hard to comprehend, even now. In the end we played in the region of 130 shows. That’s ridiculous! I can’t believe we genuinely did that many shows, and the fact we even had the opportunity is such a huge thing. Better still, the crowds were always amazing. There’s a lot of homesickness and missing friends and family on the road, of course. We were still only young lads who’d recently moved away from home, and now suddenly we were off halfway round the world. So I’m not gonna lie. There have been times on tour when I’ve struggled – you’d be a liar if you were to say it was always perfectly fine. Then one of the lads would say something, or do something stupid and make me laugh, and I’d be fine again. We were just getting used to life on the road, I guess. Later, in 2013, when I realised I couldn’t go to my granddad’s funeral because I’d got a gig in Australia, that hit home and really hurt.