But even sharing the stage with a throng of dancers and a gospel choir, Styles looked isolated. Dancing in sync, but never touching. The video feels lonelier still: in it, Styles is chased through a barren hotel by a hulking, long-haired man before he ends up back in his room, by himself again. Meanwhile, the lyrics suggest love (“We belong together”) but also, and maybe more importantly, painful self-knowledge: “It’s best you know what you don’t/ The aperture lets the light in.”

It makes sense that Styles would use a camera as a metaphor for introspection. Since he auditioned for The X Factor at the age of 16, Styles has been one of the most filmed, photographed and looked at men on the planet. Though he didn’t progress in the competition as a solo artist, judge Simon Cowell spotted his potential and put him together with four other contestants to form One Direction. They came third overall, but once the show was over, they were unstoppable. 1D became the biggest boyband on the planet. The only adult life Styles has ever known has been a public one. 

And boyband fame is possibly the most brutal kind. There’s a scene in the 2013 documentary One Direction: This is Us that has stuck with me since I first watched it. The band attempts a shopping trip in Amsterdam, and gets mobbed. The boys are grabbed and clawed at by desperate, shrieking girls. After taking refuge in a Nike store, band member Liam Payne talks to the camera. “One of them had my ear and wouldn’t let go,” he says. “I think she wanted to keep it. I said, you can’t have that, it’s mine.” Payne laughs, but his expression suggests someone who has looked into the abyss. 

One Direction broke up in 2016. Payne died in 2024 after falling from his hotel balcony. It was the kind of messy, horrible, drug-fueled death where misadventure is hard to tell from suicide. Shortly before he died, he reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” Not long after Payne’s death, I interviewed a number of ex-boyband members for a feature, and almost all of them described their experience of celebrity as a kind of trauma. “You are a commodity, and not a human,” Ritchie Neville, formerly of Five, told me. “People crack, but I’m surprised more people don’t crack.”

Fame can be intrusive and sadistic for women (I wrote a book, Toxic, about exactly that). Men rarely attain the kind of “car crash” status that is often thrust on a female celebrity, in which watching her decline becomes a kind of spectator sport: think of Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears. But talking to Neville made me wonder whether there was something even more destructive in male fame. Female popstars are sexualized, but they don’t become the focus for mass performances of hysterical lust in the way that boyband members do. To be desired so violently — desired to the point that your fans would rip you apart just to have something of you — must do something terrible to a person. Of course it would fuck you up. 

One of the striking things about Styles, in fact, is how not fucked up he’s always seemed to be. He seems to have a protective reluctance to give too much away: characteristically, he has said very little about his feelings on Payne’s death beyond a short statement in the immediate aftermath, though he did address it in an interview with the DJ Zane Lowe for the new album. “Full transparency, it’s something that even the idea of talking about it I struggle with,” he said. “I really struggled with how strange it is to have people own part of your grief in a way.” Fame means that even the most devastating personal experiences can be turned into public property.

It’s something that Styles went through, albeit in a smaller way, back in 2014 when his breakup from Taylor Swift was widely understood to be the inspiration for her album 1989, though some of the references were relatively subtle. Styles gave his own musical account of the Swift break-up on his self-titled debut album, in the song “Two Ghosts”. But that’s an exception in his discography. Styles’s songs are, in general, intimate but impersonal: they very rarely map onto the tabloid version of his life in the way Swift’s songs do. What they often share, though, is a powerful sense of loneliness — a kind of loneliness that chimes, sometimes deliberately and sometimes fortuitously, with his listeners’ lives.

His second album, Fine Line, was released in 2019, but the wistful longing for contact that underpins it felt authored for the lockdown years. “I don’t want to be alone,” he sighs on the opener, “Golden”. When “Watermelon Sugar” was released as a single in 2020, it made perfect sense that the video opened with the message: “This video is dedicated to touching.” It was already a song about skin hunger, which many of us were experiencing that year. The 2022 follow-up, Harry’s House, was directly shaped by those weird years: Styles has said in interviews that “As It Was” in particular was written about the seeming impossibility of returning to normal after the pandemic. 

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Even in his acting roles, Styles seems drawn towards characters with a deeply melancholy failure to connect. His two leading movie roles (in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling) attracted little praise for his dramatic skills, and it’s true that Styles has never yet managed to be truly convincing when delivering dialog, but both films should be recognized as brave, interesting choices which cut against the heartthrob expectations he carried with him: in the former he played a closeted policeman in Fifties Britain, and in the latter he played a red-pilled nightmare who turns out to have kidnapped his wife and forced her consciousness into a simulation of midcentury American white-picket bliss. 

But what makes Styles such a great artist of loneliness isn’t just that he understands its pangs. It’s also that he finds something seductive in that idea of being alone. The pain is a good pain — the sharpening, purifying kind. It’s notable that the hobby he has to unwind from being a popstar is long-distance running, which is one of the most solitary things you can do. In a conversation with the author Haruki Murakami (also a runner) for the magazine Runner’s World, Styles describes the joy of running like this: “you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.”

There’s something else quite telling in that dialogue. Styles tells Murakami: “I think my favorite thing about you is that I know nothing really about you, other than the work you’ve given to people. So I’m as deeply grateful for the amount that you’ve chosen to keep to yourself as for what you’ve chosen to share with us.” It’s a comment that echoes Styles’s own apparent strategy for surviving fame: extreme, meticulous reserve. It’s a method that echoes the careful distance David Bowie kept between himself and his audience, often using characters (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane) as a screen. Styles’s fashion icon status and arty performances are clearly indebted to Bowie, but this unapologetic self-protection might be the most significant influence that Styles has taken.

One way to describe fame is that it’s the condition of being loved too much — loved more than any one person can bear. For someone like Styles, who has had to survive an entire adulthood of that love, solitude must be the most fascinating thing. For most people, isolation is one of the painful conditions of our age: too much time hunkered down in solitary laptop labor, too many friendships that exist only on screens, too little touch. Styles’s extreme celebrity enforces isolation (when a trip to the shops provokes a riot, all you can do is stay at home), but it also turns being left alone into a luxury. That means that he can find beauty in a condition that, for so many people, is an ugly inevitability. Styles is our perfect pop star because he has found the romance in loneliness.

It is easy to forget just how big a deal One Direction once was. Though for my part a vehicle for delicious teenaged disdain, this X-Factor-forged grouping made its way from the brain of Simon Cowell into the dreams and diaries of a generation of teenage girls. So widespread was the contagion that the general phrase “in one direction” could not be uttered in a classroom without at least a couple of girls whooping. These Harry Styles fangirls (for it was always Harry, not Liam, who commanded the most attention) are now professional women hurtling towards their thirties — who still hold a dim candle for the floppy-haired fivesome, and still plan on walking down the aisle to Story of my Life. One school friend, wistfully recalls the O2 gig for their 2013 Take Me Home tour. “In a way, we’ve all grown up with the boys of One Direction,” she tells me, with a reverence last heard when the Queen died.

Zayn Malik’s departure in 2015, followed by the band’s “indefinite hiatus”, prompted a period of mourning compared at the time — to the dismay of most — with John leaving the Beatles in 1969. If Lennon’s assassination had taken place in the age of Musk’s X rather than in fax-tastic 1980, the response may well have been similar to yesterday morning’s World of Payne conspiracy bed-in. For the social-media response to Liam Payne’s death was, to put it simply, a mess. It represents the bottom of the barrel of feverish panic untethered from reality, frenzied feeling untempered by context. Twitter is awash with unverified images of a smashed television, a dirty bathroom scattered with burnt foil, lighters, white powder on a desk and a blackened soda-can lid. A spurious source tells of a drug-addled attempt to jump into a pool from a balcony. Others blame Payne’s ex-girlfriend Maya Henry, whose roman à clef, Looking Forward, said to be based on their fraught relationship, has just come out. In it, the main character, Mallory, starts going out with Oliver, a former member of the winkingly named band 5Forward. Oliver is violent, addicted and constantly threatening suicide.

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The Maya question becomes the touch paper for a savage social-media row about toxic relationships and accountability. Elsewhere, unsubstantiated rumours of forced abortions bubble up; the One Direction fandom, known for ruthlessly hunting down suspected girlfriends when the band was together, seems to have carried on the toxic feminine fixation into grisly finger-pointing in this moment of tragedy — not unlike how Yoko Ono was singled out as the catalyst for Lennon’s departure from the Beatles. And Liam-Lennon comparisons don’t end there. While the latter’s solo career merits considerably more praise than Payne’s — as anyone who’s both seen the questionable choreography for 2017’s “Strip That Down” and listened to the masterwork that is “Plastic Ono Band” knows — both had difficult final years, pockmarked by addiction and abuse allegations. Lennon’s little-remarked-upon Reagan fanboy era is less embarrassing than anything Payne has said, thought or breathed since 2016, but Lennon had the grace of analogue media, so that interview blips vanished into the ether.

Payne, conversely, has suffered many moments of accidental virality since leaving the band: the worst was in the aftermath of Will Smith’s wife-defending bitchslap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. Caught by a Good Morning Britain reporter on the red carpet, jaw swinging and eyes wide, Payne embarked on a bizarre two-minute, 27-second appraisal of the slap. “There were three losers in one fight,” he drawled, with the dawn-defying certainty of someone standing in a stranger’s kitchen at 6am. “He didn’t know, being Chris Rock. He didn’t wanna do what he had to do, being Will Smith. And she did nothing, being Jada.” He went on to designate Smith “one of the world’s best emoters”, confirming — presumably in a moment of paranoia — “We’re all very human, right?” Another similarly viral moment is a clip from an interview with Logan Paul that same year, in which he recalls a physical fight with a 1D bandmate. Having been thrown up against a wall, Payne rehearses his Liam Neeson-style response: “If you don’t remove those hands, there’s a high likelihood you’ll never use them again.”

Payne’s trajectory is that of the first generation of celebs to become real-time memes; in his lifetime, he was ruthlessly mocked for these moments of cockiness and cringe. The shock, sorrow and speculation on social media rings somewhat hollow given the brutality of those same sites to a man who must have seemed for a time, untouchable — but whose mental health problems were no doubt aggravated by never being truly taken seriously, digitally haunted by his own gaucherie.

To put it in Gen Z terms, “Liam Payne’s fall-off needs to be studied”. His life and death is fascinating because of its trajectory from the waiting rooms of an ITV talent show to the living rooms of millions of Saturday-night viewers, thence to the Twitter feeds of sniggering haters (“have you seen Liam Payne’s filler!”) and now the sombre and legally cautious front pages of the nationals. He leaves behind a seven-year-old son, Bear, fathered with the former X-Factor judge Cheryl Cole, and a murky, desperate legacy. A 14-year-old from Wolverhampton was slingshotted into stratospheric fame on the relentless juggernaut of the X-Factor; too much, too young doesn’t even cut it. The hordes of parasocial teenage fans, the feverish fanfiction imagining homoerotic encounters between 1D bandmates, the ever-available drugs which, if those photos are anything to go by (and they very much may not be) had reached the final, deadly form of freebase cocaine.

It’s a narrative that repeats itself in public breakdowns or tragedies every few years — from Macaulay Culkin to Drew Barrymore, via fellow talent show martyr Darius Campbell Danesh, from the Pop Idol era of celebrity, who died in 2022 after inhaling chloroethane. For Payne and others, the fact of growing up a matinee idol, a teen heart-throb, must cause a fission in identity: you are both the “normal boy” plucked from obscurity and the floppy-fringed one on the bedroom wall. Payne’s latter-day pomposity cannot have been helped by forming this identity in rooms populated only by fans and yes-men; he never had the opportunity to be swerved on the dance floor, to be chastised or nurtured or corrected.

The One Direction boys were subject to a fame so glaring that it burrows into any vulnerability and seeks endless revenge for, as is inevitable, not ending up the person a 12-year-old fan imagined you to be 10 years ago. For Payne, whose struggles with mental health and addiction were well documented, it was a spotlight which he did not survive. Fame and youth produce a strange chemical reaction which freezes its subjects in perpetual teenage heartthrob-dom; while 1D’s fans have got jobs, filed tax returns, even started families, Payne was left to chase the impossible ideal of his 14-year-old self these women once loved him for. For all but the most hysterical of these grown-up Directioners, his death will prompt only a surprised grunt and 10 minutes of disinterested scrolling; those who once wept in arenas as he sang now have Tubes to catch, dogs to walk, lives to get on with. And Liam Payne himself? He’s just another young star to die drugged-up and paranoid, staring into the abyss, when he just needed to be put to bed and told everything is okay.