‘I was a Directioner – here’s what Liam Payne and the band meant to me’

When One Direction were on The X Factor, I was 12 years old.

I’ve often joked I was the perfect age to be indoctrinated. I hadn’t previously shown any interest in boys – but Harry, Niall, Louis, Liam and Niall were different.

Their teenage good looks, their cheeky, charming personalities, and the fact they weren’t much older than I was meant they quickly became my whole life.

I followed all the classic fangirl rituals: reading One Direction fanfiction, watching every interview the band gave, maxing out my parents’ landline phone bill by voting for them on The X Factor.

For me, it was almost an afterthought that they were musically talented, something they proved as they honed their skills as performers during the reality show’s weekly live performances, after being put together as a group by Simon Cowell.

I wasn’t alone in my obsession. Fans – or Directioners, as we were quickly named – were a huge, sprawling community.

It was more common for girls in my year group at school to be besotted with them than not. We all had a favourite band member, and wore wristbands with Harry, Zayn, Liam, Louis or Niall’s name on them.

When the boys were seen in public, even in the early X Factor days, they were mobbed by adoring fans.

During the band’s time on the show, ITV also published video diaries on YouTube, which weren’t included in the televised programme.

Filmed as the boys sat on the stairs of the X Factor House, where they spent most of their time during the show, they offered an insight into the singers’ personalities.

In one clip, the band members were asked what their roles were in the group.

“Liam is the smart one, Harry is the flirt, Zayn is vain, Niall is the funny one,” replies 18-year-old Louis, before Harry adds: “Louis is the leader.”

We all clung to the bizarre facts revealed in these videos: that Liam hated spoons (he later explained he had a phobia of using them, in case they were dirty), and that Louis was obsessed with carrots.

Following the band’s time on The X Factor, my bedroom wall became plastered with their faces, and I begged my parents to let me see them on their first tour in 2012.

I succeeded, and my mum drove me two hours with one of my school friends to go to a gig in Bournemouth – a show which was added in order to record the band’s tour DVD. I’ve never been in a room with people so excited.

The hysterical screaming didn’t seem to stop but it didn’t bother me because, of course, I was also screaming my lungs out.

When Zayn pointed in the direction of my One Direction banner, I fell to the floor crying. It wasn’t an unusual response among the girls in the room.

At that time, I spent most of my free time online, keeping up with the boys, and with my new friends: fellow One Direction fans.

One Direction formed around the time Twitter was taking off as a platform. Long before social media managers were commonplace, Liam, Harry, Zayn, Louis and Niall often tweeted from their personal accounts.

Liam once tweeted the then-US president Barack Obama, asking if he’d bought One Direction’s debut album yet. He also asked Kim Kardashian what her favourite track on it was.

For their part, fans would send hundreds of tweets to the boys, trying to get them to notice or follow them.

Social media was still in its infancy but it made the band available to fans around the world in a way they wouldn’t have been when The X Factor first aired in 2004 – 18 months before Twitter was founded.

As One Direction grew up, so did I – and I started thinking about what I wanted to do for a job.

Thanks to my obsession with the charts – and of course, One Direction – I knew I wanted to work in entertainment, interviewing the pop stars I’d grown up listening to.

The band had announced an indefinite hiatus by the time I started working in the industry in 2016.

But even though I’d grown up, and One Direction posters no longer lined my walls, my dream of meeting the band lived on.

By the time I started working, the boys had started their solo careers. Liam’s first single, Strip That Down, with rapper Quavo, was a worldwide hit, charting at number three in the UK when it was released in 2017.

He was keen to do the work to promote his music, and wouldn’t shy away from talking to reporters at red carpet events.

The first time I spoke to him in 2017, I was a student in journalism college, covering Capital Radio’s Jingle Bell Ball.

It was one of the first times I’d covered an event on my own, and I was petrified, like a rabbit in the headlights standing in the scrum of reporters and flashing cameras.

Then Liam walked down the red carpet in my direction, and he stopped to speak to me.

I was 19, starstruck, and couldn’t believe my luck – I was completely and utterly unprofessional.

As soon as he approached me, I blurted out: “Oh my God, I was such a One Direction fan.”

He smiled, looked me in the eyes and thanked me, and managed to look interested even though he had likely heard my questions hundreds of times already that day.

Liam seemed very well media trained, and was comfortable with reporters, appearing to find it easy to build a good rapport with us.

At the end of our chat, we took a quick selfie, which he was happy to pose for.

The next time I interviewed Liam, it was as a junior reporter for a national newspaper, and his personable manner was much the same.

In the years that followed, I didn’t interview Liam again but I continued to read about his career.

It was clear that fame wasn’t always easy for him and, despite looking at home in front of a camera, he was later open about struggling with the pressures of celebrity and with alcohol.

When the news of Liam’s death broke on Wednesday, I was having dinner at a friend’s house, and we sat watching the BBC News Channel in disbelief. I listened to One Direction on the way home and couldn’t stop myself from crying.

For me, and for countless others who grew up as Directioners, it feels like the end of something which was an integral part of our adolescence.

For that, I’ll always thank Liam.