Artist
Photo: Soccer Aid for UNICEF / CC BY 3.0
Before he was a household name, Liam Payne was a teenager from Wolverhampton who had already been cut from The X Factor in 2008. He returned in 2010, and when the show placed him in a group with Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik, the result was One Direction, one of the best-selling boy bands of all time. Payne co-wrote a number of the group's songs with Tomlinson, and it is in that songwriting work that his contribution is most easily traced.
After the band's hiatus in 2016, Payne began a solo career with Capitol and Republic Records. His debut single, Strip That Down, reached number three in the UK and number ten on the US Billboard Hot 100, and in 2018 he teamed up with Rita Ora on For You, a hit worldwide. His debut and sole solo album, LP1, followed in December 2019. Across the first three years of that career he sold over 18 million singles. He died in Buenos Aires on 16 October 2024, aged 31, after falling from a hotel balcony.
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Styles played the tribute at his sold-out New York show on the second anniversary of the One Direction singer's death, telling the crowd he wrote it about two years ago.
EILISH Editorial Team