Suzanne Harrington: Liam Payne was promised fame and fortune — what he got is no tomorrow
Liam Payne attending The Sun Military Awards 2020 held at the Banqueting House, London.
“I can remember when there were 10,000 people outside our hotel. We couldn’t go anywhere. It was just gig to hotel, gig to hotel. And you couldn’t sleep because they’d still be outside.”
Imagine that’s your life, and you’re constantly being told that you’re living the dream. Except now it’s your waking reality, 24/7.
Fame means thousands outside the window and millions in the bank — obsessionally adored and desired by strangers everywhere, living a five-star life.
Yet in interviews, Liam Payne spoke about the “cabin fever” of that life, a life which caused him to go psychologically “Awol”. In the end, his dream life was the death of him.
Not going to lie — being Gen X, all I knew about One Direction is that they were a successful Simon Cowell lab experiment.
Created in a pop petri dish of pressure, promise, and expectation, they were five random kids who had wealth and fame dangled in front of their still-forming brains. And then all those promises came true.
In the fascinating Museum of Brands in London’s Notting Hill, its glass cases crammed with consumer goods from Victorian magic pills (“cures fear, dread, hysteria”) to horrible 1970s confectionary, the 2010s section has an entire wall devoted to One Direction.
Magazine covers, clothing, every kind of merch emblazoned with their eager faces; no longer ordinary human boys, but a currency, a teen scream generator. A five-headed cash machine. A mega-brand.
One Direction were hardly unique — this is the trajectory of successful manufactured pop acts everywhere.
K-Pop groups come from the same hot-housed, quasi-militarised regime, shoved through the same music industry sausage machine, the one that turns raw teen meat into shiny pop product.
The suicide rate among K-Pop stars is so high academic papers have been written on it.
Overwhelmed by addiction, overwhelmed by all his dreams coming true.
How do you transition to adulthood without losing sight of yourself, if your formative years are spent in a vacuum of luxe isolation, your every move scrutinised, regurgitated, misinterpreted, misrepresented, so that ‘normal’ no longer exists?
Yet ‘rich and famous’ is the bait with which ordinary teens are lured to become pop drones for an industry that cares nothing about their welfare, beyond the shallowest of lip service.
Ordinary kids who dream of being plucked from nowhere and elevated skyward form queues around the block to be the next big thing, desperate to be strapped to a music industry rocket and blasted into fame space.
Turns out this is an airless black hole of media intrusion, social media overload, loss of reality, and the toxic conjoined twins of massive ego and low self-esteem. Zero gravity.
You’re not even a person anymore, just an over-styled blank space onto which strangers project their desires.
And you’re still a kid. Fame — what you get is no tomorrow.
