The most striking images concern the fans who improvised a vigil for him, bringing candles and posters with various dedications. Girls in their twenties, who grew up with his music, their music, because if you were a teenager around 2012 it was impossible to remain indifferent to One Direction: they were everywhere, there were those who hated them, those on social media at the time launched memes and theorized the “end of music”, faced with yet another boy band set up around the table and which had taken over a new generation; and then there were them, the directioner (but be careful not to think that they were just girls), so they simply were All. Nothing new, it’s the song cycle. And people: today many are almost thirty years old, life will also have shown them that the world is not the sugar world promised by their idols and the band’s posters will be in a drawer together with the other memories.

Yet the scenes of the vigil still sound strange: the tears are not the same as those of those who cried with emotion waiting for them for hours under the hotels, the phrases on the billboards were not the naive ones that were read from the front rows at concerts. Although everything had already changed, for them and for the protagonists of this story, Liam Payne’s death represents the loss of innocence for a generation.

@ayelentorres66 #FANGIRL ♬ sonido original – Aye 🤍

A generational mourning

Maybe we were all, really, more naive then. There were those who wanted to be made fun of by a band that was really standing on the table, with mostly catchy and deadly songs but which on an artistic level, of depth, left the time they found, focusing everything on presence scenic and, it goes without saying, beautiful – and ok. And there were those who hated them, of course, but they didn’t imagine that behind the all-consuming industry there were so many things left unsaid. Payne’s artistic and human parable, even before the tragedy with which it ended, was already there to demonstrate how rotten the system that had kept him standing was, something that not even Harry Styles’ solo rebirth, to be meticulous , could have covered: of course, he managed to survive that season artistically, to demonstrate that from that pop and those supermarket idols it was possible to extract a pop star and an idol of an absolute level; but at what price? Save one, to forget the others.

Liam Payne, Harry Styles’ pain: “I’m devastated, with him my best years”

And to think that Payne, at the beginning, was considered the most talented. It was 2010, he was 17 years old and on his second attempt to participate in X Factor UK the producers thought of grouping him with other peers, in a game à la Dr. Frankenstein who would soon become bigger than them. Thus One Direction was born, a global phenomenon that until 2015, the year of the indefinite break, would rest first on the shoulders of Payne – who was also the one with the most experience – and only later, gradually, on those of the others, including Styles . It wasn’t a matter of stealing each other’s thunder, but it was reasonable to think that once everyone went their separate ways, Payne’s would be paved with gold. And instead 2 +2 doesn’t always equal four, sometimes many, many factors simply come into play; character counts more than talent, perhaps, and he has lost himself. Of all the pieces he wrote himself, because he was also a decent author, none of them ever really made it, perhaps only the very first ones. His star has been fading, despite the fact that he never lacked support for his former teammates.

@dapage_ Liam Payne’s first audition on the X Factor #xfactor #liampayne #ripliampayne #onedirection #fyp ♬ Strip That Down – Liam Payne

The dark side of One Direction

Alongside, that human crisis, as well as artistic, which these people find themselves facing who at thirty have already done everything, or nothing that is, and must invent a future far from prejudice. Styles made it despite many other sufferings, he, like the others, remained “the one from One Direction”. Which in the meantime were no longer there. And little by little noir-tinged stories about the supposed golden years came to the surface: abuse, pressure, crises of anxiety and collective depression for having found themselves without warning on a ride that was only fun at the beginning and which soon however risked to crush them, preventing them from going down. Born premature and in poor health, Liam was among the first to spill the beans and talk about how being part of such a boy band had left him with deep scars, with consequences that he faced every day: identity problems first and foremost, but above all an addiction to alcohol and drugs that would end up ruining his career and loved ones. There is a void he leaves in music, in the lives of those close to him and in those who loved One Direction; and there is a void that it leaves inside all of us.