Payne drew the short straw in One Direction; now we'll never know the real him

In and out of the boy band, Liam Payne struggled to find a defining identity, writes Mark Beaumont. His life now cut tragically short, the singer is likely to remain elusive forever

- Mark Beaumont

For One Direction, the cue-card screams of the X Factor studio filled the world. In 2012, they popped out of trapdoors in plumes of smoke onto the Madison Square Garden stage to find they hadn’t just broken America, they’d turned it into a deafening cacophony of shrieking young lust. In 2014, their homecoming trio of shows at Wembley Stadium made Shea Stadium in 1965 sound like the most reverent Barbican recital. Hordes of howling fans crammed the streets outside their New York hotels and besieged every signing session and red-carpet appearance. For six years, these young men were nothing short of seismic.

On the back of 70 million album sales and four US No 1 albums – their fifth, 2015’s Made in the AM, only pipped by Justin Bieber – this fresh-faced five-piece drove international stadiums to scenes of teen mania on some of the highest-grossing tours of all time. Though as openly manufactured as they come, literally put together by an industry committee on TV in 2010, they single-handedly revived and reinvigorated a boyband genre that had been in the doldrums since the days of NSYNC and Westlife, spending six years as the most hysteria-inducing British pop sensation since The Beatles.

All of which makes for a highly pressurised hothouse bubble. Liam Payne – who died yesterday after falling from a third-floor balcony at the CasaSur Hotel in Buenos Aires, aged just 31 – had spoken in 2017 about how the “cabin fever” of being in 1D “sent me a bit awol at one point, if I’m honest. 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.” But when the screaming stops, or even noticeably quietens, the relative silence can fill with even more intrusive and confusing questions.