All those British teenagers who buy the lie that TV talent shows and celebrity status offer a dream life of riches, fame and cachet should look closely at the tragic death of Liam Payne today. And they should be very careful what they wish for.
Payne, 31, shot to fame in 2010 during season five of The X Factor when he was placed in the band One Direction along with Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik.
One Direction went on to become one of the world’s most successful boybands, selling more than 70 million records.
Today a preliminary autopsy into Payne’s death after a fall from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, Argentina, revealed he died from “multiple traumas” that caused “internal and external bleeding.
And distressingly a transcript of an emergency call the hotel desk manager made to 911 had already been released before the autopsy was opened.
The manager is heard telling the operator he has a “guest drunk with drugs and alcohol” and that “he is breaking everything in the room.”
He then tells the operator they “need to send someone with urgency because I don’t know if the guest’s life is in danger because he is in a room with a balcony. We are afraid he could do something that threatens life.”
Again we need to wait for the clarity of the full autopsy but Payne had made no secret of his battle with alcohol addiction, both at the peak of his success with One Direction and subsequently.
Indeed in an interview with TV adventurer Ant Middleton on his “Straight Talking” show in 2019 Payne admitted having “hit rock bottom” and added: “I’m quite lucky to be here still, which is something I’ve never really shared with anyone.
“I can’t go too deep into it because I don’t know how I feel myself. I still haven’t made my peace with it, to be honest.
“There’s times where that level of loneliness and people getting into you every day. Just every so often, you’re like, when will this end? That’s almost nearly killed me a couple of times.”
Whatever the true circumstances of Payne’s death – and X is predictably awash with conspiracy theories already – that should have served as an extremely loud warning bell. Perhaps for us all.
Child stars (for that is what poor Liam was) going off the rails is a tale as old as Vaudeville. Think Macaulay Culkin, Lindsay Lohan, Drew Barrymore, Tatum O’Neill, Melanie Griffith, even Britney herself. And the list of dead and addicted pop stars is even longer.
The idea that kids – turned into cash machines by cynical industry grown-ups – can deal with either the pressures of celebrity, or the debauched lifestyle which almost inevitably comes with it, is utterly wrong.
A pal of mine was a celebrity journalist and bought hook line and sinker into the same glittery lifestyle of the stars he wrote about, with all of its vacuous surface glamour and essential emptiness. The clubs, the parties, the drugs, the booze. He’s dead of course. And he was a grown-up.
Liam Payne was only 14 when he first auditioned for the X Factor and 16 when he joined One Direction. He was a child.
And yes it is true that Liam struggled to find a new role after One Direction basically ended in 2015 and one can only imagine how much that must have hurt. After years of easy success and hero worship how bewildering must it be for a child star to suddenly have that taken away?
Perhaps, still in your teens, you must struggle with how to fill the rest of your life. And what, precisely, do you fill the void with? I think we all know the answer to that question.
You may think all those involved in the X Factor and One Direction should be taking a long, long, hard look at themselves today. Payne was a child thrust into a very grown-up world simply to make lots and lots of money.
