'Liam seemed like the last person who would meet such a tragic end'

Peter Hart edited a music magazine in the early days of One Direction. Here, he remembers Liam Payne as a shy teenager on the cusp of stardom

- PETER HART

Running towards me like overexcited puppies, One Direction were brimming with happiness and the thought of what lay ahead of them. It was early 2011 and they’d just come third on The X Factor, behind winner Matt Cardle and Rebecca Ferguson, who came second. But everyone knew they were the standout stars of the show — and as the then editor of a popular teen pop magazine, my postbag and email inbox was already full of excited messages from fans. In fact, I’d never seen hysteria like it — and I just had to meet the band.

Nobody could have predicted the twists and turns these young men’s lives would take over the following years, sadly culminating in band member Liam Payne’s death in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 16 October aged just 31.

But some 13 years earlier, One Direction didn’t even really know what fame was. I was gathered with the band — Liam, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson — in a lavish south-east London mansion for their first-ever magazine photoshoot and they just couldn’t contain themselves. Startlingly younger in the flesh than they’d seemed on TV during their X Factor journey, full of naivety and the farting-and-burping, punch-you-on-thearm silliness of teenage boys, Louis was the eldest at 19, Zayn was 18, and Liam, Harry and Niall were the babies of the band, at 17 years old.

Liam instantly stood out to me — for not standing out at all. Of course, they were all good-looking lads, but once the initial excitement wore off that day, Liam was quieter than the others, less sure of himself, more shy. The bravado that millions of TV viewers had seen when Liam winked at X Factor judge Cheryl Tweedy during his first audition singing Fly Me To The Moon at just 14, despite being later rejected, before confidently returning two years later to sing Cry Me A River and being sent through, was missing.