He was such a cool man. He actually requested ‘You Are So Beautiful’, one of the songs that One Direction sang on The X Factor, to be played at his funeral. That was typical of him, mixing the good with the bad. I wanted to make a gesture of remembrance when we lost him, so that’s when I got my first tattoo. It’s on my right chest and is simply his name.
While we’re on the subject of tattoos, you may have noticed I’ve had quite a few! I love getting tattoos and I really enjoy the whole culture around them too. I like going to the tattoo parlour, meeting all these interesting people, being involved in all that. When I had that first one done for my granddad I realised that it wasn’t actually that painful, so I immediately wanted more. I’m currently working on a full sleeve and I’ve found a really cool guy in LA who does all my work. I like the fact that tattoos allow me to say something without physically saying something – you know what I mean? I’m not one for making big, loud announcements, drawing attention to myself, all that. Tattoos are not so much a statement – I see mine as more like me saying something to myself, creating a little visual memento to remind me of a certain important time in my life. A quiet reminder.
Anyway, back to One Direction. We signed our record deal pretty quickly after the show and that was just mad. My main worry was that we’d only come third. I felt we’d done really well, but I was saying to the lads, ‘We’re all very aware that there are no guarantees about succeeding, or even getting a record deal here, boys.’ So to sign the contract was a great starting point. I knew we had so much work to do before we could even put out a single, but at least we had a chance.
The five of us had a tight chemistry almost from the word go. To backtrack a little bit, I felt we really clicked the first time when we met up at Harry’s step-dad’s bungalow. I arrived late ’cos I had some family stuff going on. While that was sorted, my dad was saying to me that maybe I didn’t need to go to the rehearsals yet. He was going, ‘You can spend a bit more time at home before you go off.’ I wonder if he knew then that if the band worked I’d be leaving home pretty much for good? Maybe he was trying to hold on to me ...
Anyway, I needed to go, we had to rehearse and there was work to do. Louis came to my house to pick me up. He came straight up to where I lived and parked right outside my house in his little Renault Clio. He shouted, ‘Come on, Zayn!’ so I ran out and jumped in the car. He was driving pretty crazy, doing all this mad stuff and I was thinking straight away, He’s a funny lad! On the way to Harry’s we ended up nearly having a crash on the motorway but, to be fair to him, there was some good driving, and we swerved it out and survived! Joking aside, I knew straight away that I was gonna get on with him, ’cos Louis is just one of the lads.
We got to the bungalow and it was a bit odd at first ’cos the lads were like, ‘Why haven’t you been here the last coupla days?’ but then after that we got on great. I spent virtually the whole time at that bungalow laughing. For me, after that, I realised it wasn’t gonna be that hard to get on with these lads. We just seemed to click straight away.
The first few weeks of PAs and club shows after The X Factor was a really intense time. We were fresh out of the show, so everything felt new to us. We were doing these little gigs up and down the country, playing in all these weird places with about 250 people crammed in – mad times. What completely amazed me was how girls were going faint when we turned up. I was saying to the lads, ‘I don’t understand why they’re doing that or, to be completely honest, how they even know who we are.’ I kept having to remind myself that we’d just spent weeks and weeks on the biggest show on British telly. People had been watching us perform every week. I’d watched The X Factor for many years too and I understand that as the weeks go by the viewers feel like they’re really getting to know the contestants. At the time, one of our managers said to me, ‘Zayn, the girls at those shows feel a real intimacy with the band. You’re only just starting to meet your fans, but they feel like they’ve known you for months.’ I get that now but at first it was a bit of a shock. I was baffled and thought what was happening was crazy.
I’m really lucky that being in One Direction has allowed me to travel all over the world. I’ve been to countries and seen cultures and ways of life that are just amazing to be around, to learn from and to soak up. When the band first started, though, I didn’t even have a passport, let alone flown on a plane! I’ll be totally honest – I’d never even seen a train. That makes it sound like Bradford is some tiny little village hundreds of miles from anywhere! It isn’t; it’s a big place, but the simple fact is that at Bradford Interchange, where I used to get my bus every day, if I’d just walked round the back there’s a train station! I’d just never bothered to go and have a look. I got my bus to classes and then went out locally. I’d never actually ever left Bradford.
So when we all piled on to the plane to head out to LA for our first ever recording session as One Direction, yes, I was the most nervous. Those nerves weren’t helped by the lads telling me, ‘The plane’s gonna do loop the loops and all these mad stunts in the air.’ I was crapping myself! Thanks, lads!
Recording in LA and Sweden was a real eye-opener for me. Some of the lads had been to the States on holiday before, but it was all new to me and I was proper excited. Even meeting American people for the first time was an interesting experience – trying to understand their accents, their slang, it was fascinating.
Also, I’d never been in a studio before (apart from the X Factor winner’s single, which was just so quick anyway). I didn’t even know how to sing in a booth using a studio mike, ’cos that’s completely different to singing on stage without headphones. You really have to concentrate on every syllable that comes out of your mouth, because those mikes are so incredibly sensitive and they pick up on everything, every little detail. Effectively, you have to learn a new way to sing, and it’s far more technical and on the button than singing live.
The producers for those early sessions were meticulous. Everything had to be sung in a certain way, it had to sound exactly right, and their attention to detail and perfectionism was incredible. They would sometimes focus on just one word for what seemed like hours, making sure it sounded perfect.
That proved to be quite a challenge for me, though. The type of singer I am means I often hear different melodies in my head. I’ll hear a song’s melody and immediately alternative tunes will suggest themselves. On stage that’s great, because I’ve the opportunity to improvise and change things around, but in the studio you need to be very precise. So at times I admit I found that really hard. I’d sometimes have my own version of a melody stuck in my head and we’d have to record my lines fifty times to keep it faithful to the original idea. That was really difficult to start off with. The producers were so focused – they just wanted everything to be perfect and, let’s face it, ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ was the result!
For our first single that song was perfect. I felt it was a really great pop song. In fact, we all felt the same way about it. It wasn’t so much that I thought it was going to go to Number 1 all around the world; I just thought it was a true representation of us five lads at that point in time. We didn’t care about girls wearing make-up – still don’t. Some pop songs can have quite questionable underlying themes, but we didn’t want to get involved with any of that. If I’m being totally honest with you, all these years later that song should feel a little awkward to sing, because I’ve moved on and grown up, but even so, it’s such a big song for us as a band that when we do perform it live the crowd goes mental and we really get into it. We were very lucky to have ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ as our début single and even luckier to see it go to Number 1 in the UK. What an amazing start!
Very quickly, life in One Direction became completely mad. Being mobbed at Heathrow Airport was a big one – that was insane. We had our jumpers ripped off us, literally pulled off our backs – that whole experience was the craziest thing ever. I said to the lads at the time, ‘I never thought I’d
see that happen to somebody else, never mind myself.’ When we’d been doing PAs and then the X Factor tour, sometimes girls would chase our car down the road afterwards, it was just mad from the word go. There were always so many fans out there waiting to meet us, they were just incredible. Heathrow took it to a whole new level, though. At that point, before the single had even come out, I was starting to think that maybe something big was happening.
Funnily enough, people tend to assume One Direction has been nothing but plain sailing, and to a certain extent that’s true. But I do remember feeling pretty vulnerable when our second single, ‘Gotta Be You’, was less well received than ‘What Makes You Beautiful’. We’d got it so right on that first single, but for the follow-up I didn’t feel we were so spot on. I remember saying to the lads one day, ‘The video doesn’t feel right to me. I’m not convinced this whole single is going to work the same way.’ People were quite into the song, but it wasn’t perceived in the right way by everyone. Although the single hit Number 3, which was brilliant, there was a worry. I was like, ‘Lads, do you think that maybe we’ve already peaked? Maybe this is all going to fizzle out as fast as it took off? Maybe we’ve had our time? Maybe this isn’t going to be as big as some people have been suggesting?’ To have failed at that stage, having already tasted some of the highs, would’ve been devastating.
Fortunately, we had a secret weapon – our amazing fans! One Direction fans are unique – they really are an army championing us all around the world. Back in the really early days, the power of our fans on social media was staggering. We would all constantly recognise that – ‘Can you quite believe what these fans are doing for us?!’ There’s a saying, ‘right place, right time’, and I definitely think we benefited from that in terms of our fans and the opportunity for them to talk about us online. That was a huge factor in our early success.
I’ve a theory about social media and our generation. I don’t want to get too deep here, but at the same time I think it’s an important reason why One Direction have enjoyed so much success. Plus I want to acknowledge the role our fans have played in our story. Ours is a whole new generation of kids who feel like this is our era. The people in each decade have their own style, and when we started off as a band the kids in our generation had social media – that was ours. There was that sense of ‘We’re gonna take control of all this. Now this is our time.’ That’s how this generation deals with stuff in our lives – everything we do is based around our social networks. Every opinion we have now is gonna be put on social networks and this is how we tell other people about every band we like. We all connect with the whole world through Twitter, Facebook and more recently Instagram. These are all sites on which our generation chats to each other. Instead of just chatting to mates locally, we can talk to people on the other side of the world as well. So what this generation has done is make the whole world our community.
All these things came together just before and then during the time we formed as a band. What that meant for One Direction was that when our fans started to talk about us online early on, the whole world heard them talking. It was crazy enough being on the biggest TV show in the UK, but ’cos the UK is pretty influential on Twitter, people out there look in to see what Brits are saying, and suddenly we were being spoken about globally. Once our fans started discussing us on social media, the scale of the thing blew up massive. That’s a major reason why we took off so quickly, perhaps in a way that no other band had ever done before (not necessarily in terms of scale but in terms of how it happened). Maybe we were the first band to benefit from the full power of that new platform? I don’t know, I could be reading too much into it. What I do know is that once our fans got onto social media, things were never the same again.
For me, the début album Up All Night is a real record of its time. We might not sing quite so high these days and maybe the lyrics we write now have changed in tone because we’re older, but that record is a really authentic reflection of where we were as a band and as five lads at that exact point in our lives. It still has some really good pop songs on there. The fact that it was a Number 1 record and did so well for us around the world is a big achievement. We were only kids. It was a big deal to get that record out and for it to do so well. I’m really proud of that album.
The headline tour to promote the début album was fantastic. We’d done those PA shows, the X Factor tour, a lot of promo performances, but nothing compared with that theatre tour. At that point I wasn’t getting much sleep – none of us were. It was pretty hardcore! We’d finish work really late at night, sometimes into the next morning, and then catch a few hours’ sleep before getting up for the early radio shows or morning TV, crack of dawn, then promo all day till the next gig. I was just running on adrenalin constantly. It was brilliant!
It’s a mad thing to go through, and at times the only thing that keeps you sane is the fact you have four other lads doing the same thing, experiencing the same feelings and events with you. I’m really lucky in that sense. Although I’m a quiet and independent person by nature, I’m really glad that I’m not by myself for this whole experience. I don’t have to sit alone on the tour bus after a show, thinking these things through. I feel that sense of camaraderie most when we’re on the road – even as far back as that first tour, we were just such a tight unit. It’s times like those on the road when I really see One Direction as my gang.
I think the public see that too. Maybe that’s part of our appeal. Hopefully, they know we have a genuine relationship behind the scenes. Bands can easily portray themselves as mates on TV or in a music video, but we actually have that as five friends – and it’s a good feeling. I believe people can see when it’s fake. They see straight through the pretence. We take the mick out of each other like normal mates would. Also, we aren’t trying to be the best of friends living in some pop band utopia. If we disagree about something we’ll have a squabble about it for half an hour, and then we’ll come back and say sorry.
We still have the same laughs now. If I wasn’t in this group I’d look and think, I wish I was mates with them lads. We’re definitely a bit of a gang, and we have our in-jokes and band humour. It’s a bit of a private club at times, but that often helps us get through the crazy stuff. I do realise it can be a little daunting when people meet all five of us together – we can take the mick and all that, but it’s a good place to be when you’re in that gang.
Next up for us was our first trip to the States. That was a big shock ’cos we didn’t really know what to expect. The US is such a big place: the geography, the population, the massive number of radio stations, venues, the scale of the promotion you’ve got to do. It’s just this huge challenge. But you know what? We were like, ‘We can’t get stuck in fast enough!’
We had the Big Time Rush support tour booked, so we were driving around in this battered van and staying in some pretty dingy hotels. It was like, ‘I don’t fancy your room much, Liam!’ There were quite a few weird places on those dates! From the very first gig those fans knew every single word of every song. When we finished each night’s set we’d get outside and jump on this rusty little tour bus and all these girls would be running out of the arena, chasing our bus down the road. We’d be looking out of the bus windows, just shaking our heads in disbelief, really. ‘What is going on here?’ It was just so odd to see. Brilliant, of course – but odd. We almost had to say it out loud to each other to try and comprehend what we were witnessing: ‘OK, these people live in North America. How come they know every single word?’ It was really that confusing.
We did a signing at a shopping mall during all this early promo and a girl gave me a CD to sign. I took the CD off her and as I did my hand must’ve touched hers ... and instantly she stone cold fainted, flat out, right on the spot. She literally dropped to the floor, lights out. I’d never seen anything like that in my life – I couldn’t believe it. I saw her eyes go and went to grab her hand, but she was already on the floor. I didn’t even know what was h
appening. The security came and had to physically lift her off the floor as she was out cold. I hadn’t got a clue what was happening. The lads said you could see it in my face. I was completely bewildered, thinking, Did that really just happen? I said to the lads, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that happen before, for a start, but also I’d only expect that to happen with someone like Michael Jackson or Elvis when they were alive. Never ever in a million years would I expect someone to react in such an extreme way to meeting me.’ It was just the weirdest thing. I couldn’t really process that back then, and to be totally honest, I still can’t now.
The States was so exciting. Every minute of every day was a new adventure – it was relentless and just brilliant. My life was moving so fast and everything was so insane, but I tried to remember how important it was to keep in touch with family and friends, to never forget that. You have to make time for these people – they’re so important.
Of course, the One Direction juggernaut was not about to stop. ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ got into the US Top 30 and we also won a Brit Award, which was crazy. Then they decided to release our début album a week early in the US ’cos it was all kicking off for us.
Initially I had very little expectation for the album. Then we started to hear people talking about big pre-sales and indications that fans were gonna buy a lot of copies. Personally, once I realised there was a chance, however small, of that album being Number 1, I was like, ‘Let’s just do everything in our power to get it there.’ We wanted to be the first UK band to do that with a début album. We were mad hungry.
So we did every interview, went to every radio station, made every appearance and got on every TV show we could. Any promo that might possibly help sales was instantly agreed to, that gang mentality came in again, and as a collective of five lads with this team behind us it was pretty powerful.
The Today show appearance during the week of the album’s release was a strangely amazing experience to try to compute. The actual performance itself was great fun and we did a good job, I think. The setting in New York was ridiculous, but it was just the sheer scale of the crowd that was incredible. I was singing and looking around, and found myself thinking of all those individual stories behind everyone who was there. All those train journeys, bus journeys, time off school, college or work, money spent on travel and food, even back to getting ready at home to come out to see us. I just kept saying, ‘It’s just so much effort by so many people.’ That’s crazy if just one person does that for your band, but when you’re confronted by thousands of people doing that it’s just the most humbling feeling. This wasn’t even a full gig, remember, it was just a TV appearance. The effort people had to make to be standing in that street right there and then ... wow! If I think about the amount of effort by that number of people, to be honest, it can blow my mind.