Why did One Direction break up? Was there any beef between Liam Payne and other members?

On Wednesday, former One Direction star Liam Payne was found dead after falling from the third-floor balcony of the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“Liam James Payne, composer and guitarist, former member of the band One Direction, died today after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Palermo,” the police statement said.

Liam Payne’s time with One Direction

Payne began his career and path to stardom with the boy band One Direction, which placed third on the seventh season of The X Factor in 2010. The band was formed of Payne, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik. They became one of the best-selling boy bands of all time. However, Payne described his time with the group as grueling and quite miserable, saying he “hated” his life.

“We were definitely overworked,” he said. “I just lived so long as this reclusive pop star who was afraid of people, who just stayed inside all the time. I needed to stop.”

Malik was the first to leave the group in 2015 and the other members followed suit in 2016. At the time, Malik said it was due to stress but later admitted he wanted to get ahead of the breakup and be the first to make a solo career. He also sited tensions between the band members due to all the fame and scrutiny.

“There was obviously underlying issues within our friendships, too,” Malik said in 2022. “We’d got sick of each other if I’m being completely honest.”

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Payne had also come out and spoke negatively about Malik and other members, saying there were “many reasons why I dislike Zayne” and “many reasons why I’ll always be on his side”. He later apologized, saying he was just “scrambling to stay relevant”.

“A lot of what I said came from the wrong place,” Payne said. “I was so angry at what was going on around me and instead of taking a look inwards, I decided to look outwards at everybody else and I took it out on everybody else, which is just wrong.” Due to his “own frustrations with my own career and where I kind of landed, I took shots at everybody else, which is wrong, so obviously I want to apologize for that in the first instance, because that’s definitely not me.”

Like Malik and other members of the band, Payne embarked on a solo career. He sold more than 23 million singles and three million albums. Still, Payne said that his mental health suffered after the band broke up and that he struggled with substance abuse.

“I kind of went off the rails a little bit and just couldn’t really figure out what was making me sad,” he said. “I hit a peak moment where I knew the drinking was going to get me; I needed to do something about it.”

In 2022, he spent time at a wellness clinic in Louisiana and opened up about his mental health the following year.