The story of One Direction

Five solo hopefuls

One Direction began as five teenagers who each walked into The X Factor alone in 2010, hoping to be the next solo star. Harry Styles was sixteen, from the village of Holmes Chapel in Cheshire. He sang in a school band called White Eskimo, which won a local battle of the bands, and he worked weekends at a bakery in the village. It was his mother who suggested he audition. On the eleventh of April 2010 he sang Train's Hey, Soul Sister, until Simon Cowell said it was the wrong song for him. So he switched to Stevie Wonder's Isn't She Lovely, and made it through to bootcamp.[1]

Niall Horan came from Mullingar in County Westmeath, Ireland. His parents split when he was five, and he grew up with his father and his older brother Greg. Greg had been given a guitar for his fifteenth birthday and barely touched it, so Niall picked it up and taught himself using videos online. The family story goes that his aunt first heard him singing in the car and assumed the radio was on. At sixteen he auditioned in Dublin with Ne-Yo's So Sick, in front of a panel that included Katy Perry as a guest judge. She liked him, and he went through to bootcamp too.[1]

Liam Payne, from Wolverhampton, was already an X Factor veteran. He was born three weeks early and spent his early childhood in and out of hospital, because one of his kidneys was scarred and not working properly. He took up running and boxing, and sang wherever he could, once in front of twenty six thousand people at a Wolverhampton Wanderers match. In 2008, at just fourteen, he auditioned with Fly Me to the Moon. Cowell sent him away at the judges' houses stage but told him to come back in two years. In 2010 he did exactly that, singing Cry Me a River.[1]

Louis Tomlinson grew up in Doncaster, the eldest of a big family, raised by his mother Johannah, known as Jay. As a child he had small parts as an extra in the television drama Fat Friends, where he first met a young actor called James Corden. At fourteen he was thrown out of his school band because the guitarist wanted to sing instead. Playing Danny Zuko in a school production of Grease gave him the push to try The X Factor. He failed to get past the producers in 2009, came back in 2010, and was sent through after singing Hey There Delilah.[1]

Zayn Malik was seventeen, from the East Bowling area of Bradford, and had grown up on his father's R and B, hip hop and reggae records. A choir leader told him he had a voice worth hearing. On the morning of his audition in Manchester he got so nervous that he refused to get out of bed, and his mother had to coax him out of the house. He sang Mario's Let Me Love You and was put through. None of the five knew each other. Within weeks, all five would be cut from the competition, and that was when their story really began.[1]

Put together at bootcamp

Bootcamp for the 2010 series began on the twenty second of July at Wembley Arena in London. Harry, Niall, Liam, Louis and Zayn all failed to make the final cut for the Boys category. The judges felt the Groups category was weak, so they called five of the rejected boys back and told them they would carry on together as a band. The date usually given for the birth of One Direction is the twenty third of July 2010. Cowell later said it took him about ten minutes to put them together. The guest judge that week, Nicole Scherzinger, has a strong claim of her own.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The boys had a couple of weeks to get to know each other and rehearse before the next stage. Harry came up with the name One Direction, simply because he thought it sounded good. Then they flew to Marbella in Spain, where Cowell was mentoring the Groups at his house with help from Sinitta. Their first song as a group was an acoustic version of Torn. Cowell told Rolling Stone that he knew they were special within a split second, but kept a straight face for the cameras. The moment they left, he said, he jumped out of his chair. To him they looked like a gang of friends, confident and fearless.[1] [2] [3]

The live shows started on the ninth of October 2010 at Fountain Studios in Wembley. One Direction quickly became a fan favourite with a huge following online, and within four weeks they were the last act Cowell had left in the competition. The final was held over the eleventh and twelfth of December. They sang Torn again, the song that had started it all, but the public vote put them third, behind the winner Matt Cardle and the runner up Rebecca Ferguson. Almost immediately, the song they would have released as winners, a version of Forever Young, leaked online.[1] [2] [3]

Losing hardly mattered. Within weeks it was confirmed that Cowell had signed them to his Syco label on a contract reported to be worth two million pounds. In January 2011 they flew to Los Angeles to start recording with the producer RedOne. A book about their X Factor journey came out in February, and from February to April they toured the country with the other finalists on the X Factor Live Tour, playing to around half a million people. Tour manager Paul Higgins would later say that once fans found out where they were staying, the band could not stay in a hotel for more than three days.[1] [2] [3] [4]

What Makes You Beautiful and America

Their first single came from the Swedish team of Savan Kotecha, Rami Yacoub and Carl Falk. Kotecha said he had carried the chorus melody around for a year. The lyric clicked one morning in a London hotel room, when his wife said she felt ugly and he told her she had no idea how beautiful she looked. He realised that was a song. What Makes You Beautiful was recorded in Stockholm and released on the eleventh of September 2011. It had broken Sony's preorder record in the UK, and it entered the chart at number one, selling nearly a hundred and fifty four thousand copies in its first week.[1] [2]

The debut album Up All Night came out in Britain and Ireland in November 2011 and reached number two in the UK. Their first headline tour sold out in minutes and opened in Watford in December. America was the bigger prize. Columbia Records signed the band in North America and tried something unusual. Instead of sending a single to radio first, the label spent four months building an audience on social media, with petitions and video contests for a concert in your town. The band's American Facebook following grew from forty thousand to four hundred thousand, and radio stations were flooded with calls asking for a song they had not played.[1] [2] [3]

By March 2012 the plan had worked. When One Direction played NBC's Today show on the twelfth of March, somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand fans packed the plaza at Rockefeller Center. The next week Up All Night entered the Billboard 200 at number one, with a hundred and seventy six thousand copies sold. No British group had ever debuted at the top of the American album chart with a first album. The previous best had been the Spice Girls, whose debut entered at number six in 1997. Liam told the BBC it was surreal, and pointed out they had not even had a number one album at home.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comparisons with Beatlemania started immediately. Paul McCartney went on breakfast television to warn that being called the next Beatles put an awful lot of pressure on a band, and suggested calling them the next terrific band instead. Then there was a legal fight. An American group had been using the name One Direction since 2009 and sued for more than a million dollars. In September 2012 the matter was settled, and the American band changed its name to Uncharted Shores. That summer the boys sang What Makes You Beautiful at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, and in September they won all three MTV Video Music Awards they were nominated for, including best new artist.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Take Me Home and the madness

The second album was made fast, largely in Stockholm in the spring and summer of 2012, while the band were still touring. Kotecha, Yacoub and Falk spent six months there writing for it. The lead single, Live While We're Young, leaked early along with its video, but still sold three hundred and forty one thousand downloads in its first American week, a record for an act from outside the US. The second single was a gentle ballad called Little Things, written by Ed Sheeran and his friend Fiona Bevan when Ed was seventeen. They had lost the song, until Fiona sent it back to him while he happened to be in the studio with the boys.[1] [2] [3]

Take Me Home was released in November 2012, with the band posed around a red telephone box on the cover. It sold five hundred and forty thousand copies in its first American week and went straight to number one. In Britain, Little Things and the album topped the singles and albums charts in the same week, making One Direction the youngest act ever to do that. They sang Little Things for the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance, and on the third of December 2012 they headlined a sold out Madison Square Garden in New York. Up All Night and Take Me Home ended the year among the five best selling albums in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 2013 they released the Comic Relief charity single, a medley of Blondie's One Way or Another and the Undertones' Teenage Kicks. The video was shot partly in Ghana, where the band volunteered at a children's hospital, and partly at Number Ten Downing Street, with a cameo from the Prime Minister David Cameron. The government even agreed to cover the VAT on sales. The critics were brutal, but the single went to number one and the campaign raised more than two million pounds. Meanwhile the Take Me Home Tour ran to a hundred and twenty three shows across four continents, including six nights at London's O2 Arena.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The documentary film This Is Us, directed by Morgan Spurlock, premiered in London's Leicester Square on the twentieth of August 2013. Police sealed off the square as an estimated seventy thousand fans packed the streets. The film went on to top the box office in Britain and America. The same month, Channel Four aired a documentary called Crazy About One Direction, which focused on some of the most obsessive fans. It caused fury. The director said she, the broadcaster and the girls who appeared in it received masses of abuse and threats online. It was an early sign of how intense, and how powerful, the fan base known as Directioners had become.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life inside the bubble was relentless. Between the end of the X Factor in December 2010 and early 2015, the band made four albums, played three world tours, one of them a hundred and twenty three dates long, made a feature film, and set off on a fourth tour. The BBC later pointed out that there were few people in their early twenties who had lived anything like it. Liam would say years later that the safest way to protect them, because of how big it got, was to lock them in a hotel room, and that the room always had a minibar. That, he said, was where his drinking began.[1] [2] [3]

Midnight Memories and the stadium years

On the third album the boys took more control of the writing, especially Louis and Liam, who worked closely with the producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan. The lead single, Best Song Ever, came out on the twenty second of July 2013 and reached number two in both Britain and America, their highest US chart placing. Its video, written by James Corden, had the band playing clueless record executives. Niall was the boss Harvey, Louis a producer called Jonny, Zayn an assistant named Veronica, Harry a marketing man called Marcel and Liam a choreographer named Leeroy. It broke the record for most views in a single day on Vevo.[1] [2] [3]

Midnight Memories arrived on the twenty fifth of November 2013 with a rockier sound, and critics noticed the band's growing hand in the songwriting. Despite coming out just weeks before the end of the year, it was the best selling album in the world in 2013, with four million copies. In America it sold five hundred and forty six thousand in its first week, and One Direction became the first group ever to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 with each of their first three albums. The industry body IFPI named them the Global Recording Artist of the Year. The second single, Story of My Life, was credited to all five members.[1] [2] [3]

Their first stadium tour, the Where We Are Tour, opened in Bogota, Colombia, on the twenty fifth of April 2014 and ended in Miami on the fifth of October. The Australian band Five Seconds of Summer opened for them. Across sixty nine shows, about three point four million people came, and the tour grossed around two hundred and ninety million dollars. It was the biggest tour of 2014 and the highest grossing tour ever by a vocal group. The pressure showed in other ways too. Niall had dislocated his troublesome knee on stage in Antwerp during the previous tour, and a leaked video appeared to show Zayn smoking marijuana.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fourth album was called Four, a name Niall suggested because it was their fourth album in four years. To announce it, they gave away a song called Fireproof for a single day, and it was downloaded one point one million times. Louis and Liam wrote most of the record with the band's regular team, including the lead single Steal My Girl, whose video starred Danny DeVito. Critics heard Journey, Fleetwood Mac and big eighties pop in it. When Four entered the Billboard 200 at number one in November 2014, One Direction became the first band in the chart's history to have their first four albums debut at the top. Billboard named them its Artist of the Year.[1] [2] [3]

The second single from Four, Night Changes, was a wistful song about time passing, with Harry taking the lead in the chorus. It reached number seven in Britain, which was modest by their standards. But it grew and grew over the years. In 2022 it became the first One Direction song to pass a billion streams on Spotify, and it remained their most played track. Four would also turn out to be the last album the five of them made together. Within months of its release, the band that had never had a line up change was about to lose a member.[1] [2]

Zayn walks away

The On the Road Again Tour opened in Sydney on the seventh of February 2015. In March, photos emerged of Zayn with his arm around a girl at a nightclub in Thailand, and rumours spread that he had cheated on his fiancee, Perrie Edwards of Little Mix. He denied it. On the nineteenth of March he left the tour, citing stress, and flew home. His last show with the band was in Hong Kong on the eighteenth. Six days later, on the twenty fifth of March 2015, the band announced that Zayn was leaving for good, and that the other four would carry on.[1] [2] [3]

In his statement Zayn apologised to any fans he had let down, and said he wanted to be a normal twenty two year old who could relax and have some private time out of the spotlight. He called Louis, Liam, Harry and Niall friends for life and said they would carry on being the best band in the world. The reaction was enormous. Fans held candlelit vigils, and Madame Tussauds in London hired staff to hand out tissues to visitors at the band's wax figures. Zayn told The Sun that leaving felt crazy and wild and a bit mad, but that he had never felt more in control.[1] [2] [3]

The friendly tone did not last long. In May 2015 the producer Naughty Boy posted a photo of himself with Zayn, apparently mocking talk that the band would replace him. Louis made fun of the photo's filter on Twitter, and Zayn fired back, asking if Louis remembered when he had a life and stopped making nasty comments about Zayn's. Years later, Louis said he had been crushed and furious that Zayn, one of his closest friends in the band, had not told him first. He suspected Zayn kept quiet because he knew Louis would try to talk him out of it. In May the four confirmed on James Corden's show that nobody would replace Zayn.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The four piece came back loudly. On the thirty first of July 2015 they released Drag Me Down with no warning and no promotion at all. It went to number one in Britain, gave them their first number ones in France and Australia, and set a new record for streams in a single week in the UK. Its video was filmed at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Even Zayn tweeted that he was proud of his boys. But in August came the news fans had feared. The band said they would take a break in 2016 so each member could work on his own projects, insisting it was not a split.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Made in the A.M. and the long goodbye

The fifth album was made knowing it would be the last for a while. The producer Julian Bunetta said there was a feeling that anything could happen during the time off, and that the record included a song about the band being on shaky ground. The second single, Perfect, written by Harry and Louis with their regular team, entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number ten in October 2015. That was the band's fifth top ten debut, breaking a record for bands previously held by the Beatles. Zayn was not a fan. He told Billboard he liked the first single but heard the second and decided not to buy the album.[1] [2] [3]

Made in the A.M. came out on the thirteenth of November 2015. It went to number one in Britain, and in America it was held at number two only by Justin Bieber's Purpose. The tour had already ended. On the thirty first of October the four played the last night of the On the Road Again Tour at Sheffield Arena. Harry told the crowd they had been a band for five years, four months, two weeks and a couple of days, and Niall remembered that their first ever gig had been in a little nightclub in Scotland. Liam insisted it was the end of the tour, not the end of One Direction.[1] [2] [3]

There were a few farewells left. They won Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards for the second year running. On the thirteenth of December 2015 they returned to The X Factor final where it had all begun, and their last televised performance as a group came on New Year's Eve in New York, on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. The final single was History, a campfire singalong written with Louis and Liam. Its video, released in January 2016, ended with the four walking off in different directions. The director Ben Winston said they were meant to run back together, and that it was supposed to feel like see you in a bit.[1] [2]

In January 2016 a magazine reported that the hiatus was really a permanent split. The band's representatives denied it, saying the plans had not changed. Harry later said he had been the first to raise the idea of a break, back in late 2014, because he did not want to exhaust the fans. Louis argued against it. At the 2017 Brit Awards the History video won Video of the Year, and Liam was the only member there to collect it. By then every member had released solo music. Later that year Harry and Liam signed papers to wind up the band's touring company, Rollcall Touring, which the BBC called another sign the band might not reform.[1] [2] [3]

Solo lives, loss and trouble

Zayn went first. His single Pillowtalk went to number one in Britain and America in early 2016, and his album Mind of Mine came out on the twenty fifth of March 2016, exactly a year after he left the band. He became the first British male artist to debut at number one in both countries with his first single and album. He also spoke frankly about the band. He said he was never allowed to experiment, that anything he sang in a slightly R and B way would be recorded again and again until there was a straight pop version, and that he had wanted to leave from the first year. He also cancelled shows because of severe anxiety.[1] [2]

Louis faced the hardest start of all. His mother Johannah was diagnosed with leukaemia, and she died on the seventh of December 2016 at the age of forty three. Three days later he performed his debut solo single, Just Hold On, with Steve Aoki on the final of The X Factor. He fought back tears as Simon Cowell told him his mother had been so proud of him. The song reached number two. More grief followed. In March 2019 his sister Félicité was found collapsed at her flat in London. She was eighteen. An inquest found she died of an accidental overdose of cocaine and prescription drugs, and heard that she had turned to drugs after losing her mother.[1] [2] [3]

Harry became the biggest solo star of the five. His first single, Sign of the Times, went to number one in Britain in April 2017, and the same year he made his film debut in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. His album Fine Line gave him a first American number one single with Watermelon Sugar, and Harry's House, in 2022, won the Grammy for Album of the Year, led by As It Was, the biggest single in the world that year. Niall found his own lane too. His debut single This Town came out in 2016, his first album Flicker went to number one in America, and later he won his first three seasons as a coach on The Voice.[1] [2]

The solo years brought legal trouble as well. In March 2017 Louis was arrested at Los Angeles airport after a scuffle with a photographer, while his girlfriend Eleanor Calder was caught up in a separate altercation. He was charged with simple battery and released on bail, and the charges were later dropped. In 2021 Zayn pleaded no contest to four counts of harassment after a row at his Pennsylvania home with Yolanda Hadid, the mother of his partner Gigi Hadid. The charges said he grabbed her and shoved her into a dresser. He was given three hundred and sixty days of probation and ordered to take anger management classes. He said it should have stayed a private family matter.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Liam had early solo hits, including Strip That Down in 2017 and For You with Rita Ora, and in March 2017 he and Cheryl had a son, Bear. But he struggled badly. He spoke openly about alcoholism, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, and in 2023 said he had spent a hundred days at a rehab facility in Louisiana and was sober. In 2022 he gave a rambling, visibly intoxicated interview on Logan Paul's podcast, in which he said there were many reasons he disliked Zayn. He later apologised. At the premiere of Louis's documentary in 2023, Liam said he had been through a dark time, and that he would not be here without the boys.[1] [2] [3]

Losing Liam

In early October 2024 Liam travelled to Argentina with his girlfriend Kate Cassidy. They went to see Niall play in Buenos Aires, and Niall later said he hugged Liam goodbye that evening, not knowing it would be for the last time. Kate flew home to Florida on the fourteenth of October, and Liam stayed on at the CasaSur hotel in the Palermo district. On the afternoon of the sixteenth of October 2024, a member of the hotel staff called emergency services about a guest who seemed to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol, was smashing up his room, and might be in danger because the room had a balcony. Minutes after emergency services arrived, Liam fell.[1] [2] [3]

He fell from the third floor balcony into the hotel's inner courtyard and died of his injuries at the scene. He was thirty one. His death was confirmed by the head of the city's emergency medical service. A post mortem found multiple traumatic injuries and internal and external bleeding. Tests later showed traces of alcohol, cocaine and a prescribed antidepressant. Prosecutors said the medical evidence suggested he may have fallen in a state of semi or total unconsciousness, which ruled out a deliberate act, and they said nobody else was involved in the fall. Police found broken furniture and drug paraphernalia in his room, and later raided the hotel for camera footage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The other four released a joint statement, signed Louis, Zayn, Niall and Harry, saying they were completely devastated and would miss their brother terribly. Zayn postponed the American leg of his tour. Robbie Williams, who had mentored the band on The X Factor and tried to help Liam, pleaded with the public to show compassion even to famous strangers. Fans held vigils around the world. Within a week all five One Direction albums were back in the UK top forty, and Liam's last single, Teardrops, entered the chart for the first time. On the twentieth of November 2024 all four bandmates attended his funeral in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, alongside Cheryl, Kate Cassidy and Simon Cowell.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In Argentina, five people were eventually charged. Liam's friend Rogelio Nores, known as Roger, and two hotel staff, the head of security and the receptionist who made the emergency call, were accused of manslaughter. A hotel employee and a waiter were accused of supplying him with drugs and were held in pre trial detention. In February 2025 an appeal court threw out the manslaughter charges. Nores said he had left the hotel forty minutes before the fall and had never been Liam's manager. The two men accused of supplying drugs still faced prosecution. In Britain, an inquest confirmed the medical cause of death as polytrauma.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As of 2026 the full inquest had still not been held. At a review in May 2026 the coroner said no new evidence had arrived from Argentina, where investigations were continuing, and he set another review for December. Liam's last television appearance came after his death, as a guest judge on the Netflix talent show Building the Band, which aired in the summer of 2025. It emerged that in the weeks before he died, he had quietly given thousands of pounds to strangers' fundraising pages for medical treatment. After his death, food bank volunteers in London revealed that he had also helped out in person, and had asked them not to make a thing of it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Legacy, as of 2026

One Direction sold more than seventy million records, won seven Brit Awards, and became the first band to see their first four albums enter the Billboard 200 at number one. But their bigger legacy may be how they did it. They were called the internet's first boy band. They broke America through Facebook and Twitter before radio played them, and their fans ran their own campaigns, wrote fan fiction read by millions. Billboard summed up their rivalry with the Wanted as a one sided stomping. And in 2024 Simon Cowell launched a search for the next One Direction, admitting that no boy band had matched them since.[1] [2] [3]

The fans themselves became a story. Directioners were among the largest fandoms on the internet, and One Direction fan fiction dominated sites like Wattpad. One of those stories, After by Anna Todd, became a series of novels and then a film series. The Hollywood film The Idea of You, about a pop star in a boy band, drew obvious comparisons, helped by the fact that its big song was written by Savan Kotecha and Carl Falk, the team behind What Makes You Beautiful. In 2019 the HBO drama Euphoria even showed an animated sex scene between Harry and Louis based on fan fiction. Louis said nobody had asked him, and he did not approve.[1] [2] [3]

As of 2026 the four surviving members all had busy solo careers. Louis released his third album, How Did I Get Here?, in January 2026, and it went to number one in Britain. Harry followed in March with Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. Zayn released Konnakol in April, and Niall's album Dinner Party came out in June and also reached number one in the UK. Niall rewrote the words of one of its songs, End of an Era, after Liam's death. Madame Tussauds retired its One Direction wax figures in 2022, but their songs kept finding new listeners, above all Night Changes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A full reunion now looks further away than ever. Louis once said he would be surprised if they lived out their lives without some kind of reunion, and that he would be up for it. After Liam's death he changed his view. In a 2025 interview he described the day the band discussed the hiatus as cold, with an emptiness he had never felt in the room before, and said he could not imagine a reunion without Liam, because no one would have campaigned harder for One Direction to come back than Liam did. Five boys who were thrown together at bootcamp in 2010 became, for a few years, the biggest band in the world.[1] [2] [3]

The people around One Direction

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. They were close from the very start, and fans quickly noticed. That closeness fed the Larry Stylinson theory, which both men have repeatedly denied, and Louis has said it made them wary of each other in public. In 2019 Louis complained that the drama Euphoria showed an animated sex scene of the two without anyone asking him. Louis has also admitted to some early envy of Harry's solo success, while saying he always knew Harry fit that mould.[1] [2] [3]

Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik. They were close friends in the band, which made Zayn's exit sting. Louis said he was crushed that Zayn did not tell him first. Weeks later they traded insults on Twitter over a photo Zayn's producer posted. They drifted apart for years, and both were among the mourners at Liam's funeral in 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson. The band's most prolific songwriting partnership. Together with Julian Bunetta and John Ryan they wrote much of Four and Made in the A.M., including Steal My Girl, History and Fireproof. Off stage they were known for charity work, once getting into a bidding war at a charity ball over having Liam's face painted. After Liam died, Louis called him his boy, one of his best friends, his brother, and later said no one would have fought harder for a reunion.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Liam Payne and Zayn Malik. A relationship with real ups and downs. In 2022, on Logan Paul's podcast, Liam said there were many reasons he disliked Zayn and many reasons he would always be on his side, then apologised for the comments. After Liam's death Zayn postponed his American tour dates, called Liam his brother in a tribute on stage, and paid tribute to him at the end of every show on that tour.[1] [2] [3]

Liam Payne and Cheryl. Cheryl was a judge when Liam first auditioned for The X Factor at fourteen, and again when he returned at sixteen. They became a couple in late 2015, and their son Bear was born in March 2017. They split in 2018 but stayed close as a family. After his death Cheryl begged the media for dignity, worried about what their son might one day read, and she attended his funeral.[1] [2] [3]

Zayn Malik and Perrie Edwards. Zayn began dating Perrie Edwards of Little Mix in December 2011, and they got engaged in August 2013. In March 2015, photos of Zayn with another girl in a Thai nightclub set off rumours of cheating, which he denied, and days later he left the tour and then the band. The couple split in August 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid. Zayn began an on and off relationship with the model Gigi Hadid in late 2015, and she starred in his Pillowtalk video. Their daughter was born in September 2020, and they lived on a farm in Pennsylvania. They split in October 2021 after the incident with Gigi's mother Yolanda, which led to Zayn pleading no contest to harassment charges.[1] [2] [3]

Harry Styles and Caroline Flack. At seventeen, Harry briefly dated the television presenter Caroline Flack, who was fourteen years older and a presenter on The Xtra Factor. The relationship caused a storm, and she faced public accusations of paedophilia. Flack struggled with her mental health for years, and in February 2020 she took her own life at the age of forty.[1] [2]

Harry Styles and Taylor Swift. Harry briefly dated Taylor Swift in 2012, and fans and critics spent years picking through songs they may have written about each other. When One Direction released Perfect in 2015, written by Harry and Louis, reviewers at Rolling Stone and Digital Spy heard it as a reply to Swift's song Style.[1] [2]

Simon Cowell and One Direction. Cowell put the band into the Groups category, mentored them on The X Factor, signed them to Syco and oversaw their career. He called their first performance fearless. When Louis sang days after his mother's death, Cowell told him on air she would have been proud. He was among the mourners at Liam's funeral, and in 2024 he began searching for the next One Direction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Savan Kotecha and One Direction. The American songwriter wrote What Makes You Beautiful with Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub, and the team shaped the early sound, spending six months in Stockholm on the second album. Kotecha credited Louis with leading the push towards a more mature sound, and years later worked on the songs for the boy band film The Idea of You.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Robbie Williams and Liam Payne. Robbie Williams met the band as a mentor on The X Factor in 2010 and stayed fond of them. He said Liam's struggles were very like his own, so he reached out to help. After Liam died, Robbie wrote about his own relapses at the same age and begged the public to show compassion before judging anyone famous.[1]

Rare facts about One Direction

• Before One Direction, no British group had ever debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with a first album. Up All Night entered at number one in March 2012 with a hundred and seventy six thousand copies. The previous best debut for a British group's first album was the Spice Girls' Spice, which entered at number six in 1997.[1]
• The What Makes You Beautiful video was shot on the same California beach as Blink 182's All the Small Things. The video was filmed over two days in July 2011 at Point Mugu in California, with the band driving an orange campervan and larking about on the sand.[1]
• Savan Kotecha wrote What Makes You Beautiful after reassuring his wife, who felt ugly one morning. He had carried the chorus melody for a year. When his wife said she felt ugly in a London hotel room, he told her she had no idea how beautiful she looked, and realised he had a song.[1]
• Little Things was written by a teenage Ed Sheeran and then lost for years. Ed wrote it at seventeen with Fiona Bevan. She sent him the forgotten song while he happened to be in the studio with One Direction, and the boys asked to record it.[1]
• The red phone box on the cover of Take Me Home now sits in the Hard Rock Cafe in London. The cover was shot at the Fawley Hill railway museum in Buckinghamshire. After Liam died in 2024, fans left handwritten notes at the phone box.[1] [2]
• A 2011 tweet from Louis to Harry once overtook Barack Obama's four more years as the second most retweeted ever. In January 2015, Louis's tweet telling Harry he was always in his heart passed Obama's famous victory tweet. Only Ellen DeGeneres's Oscars selfie had been shared more.[1] [2]
• An American band called One Direction sued the British boys and ended up renaming itself Uncharted Shores. The American group said it had used the name since 2009 and sought more than a million dollars. The dispute was settled in 2012 and the American band took a new name.[1] [2]
• Prime Minister David Cameron made a cameo in One Direction's Comic Relief video, filmed at Downing Street. The government also agreed to donate the equivalent of the VAT on sales of the 2013 single, a medley of One Way or Another and Teenage Kicks.[1]
• The This Is Us DVD beat a UK sales record set by Michael Jackson's This Is It. It sold about two hundred and seventy thousand copies in its first three days in December 2013, around ten thousand more than the Michael Jackson film.[1] [2]
• In the Best Song Ever video, Niall played a film boss called Harvey and Zayn played an assistant named Veronica. The video was written by James Corden. Louis played an executive called Jonny, Harry a marketing man named Marcel and Liam a choreographer called Leeroy.[1]
• The Story of My Life video used between six and seven thousand family photos. The set took five days to build. Each member recreated an old family photograph with the same relatives, including Harry with his mother and Zayn with his sister.[1]
• The Drag Me Down video was filmed at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The four piece were put through mock astronaut training in their first video without Zayn. It went on to win the fan voted video award at the 2016 Brits.[1]
• Danny DeVito starred in the Steal My Girl video, alongside sumo wrestlers and a chimpanzee. DeVito played a visionary director who gave each member a theme. Harry was love, Niall light, Liam power, Louis danger and Zayn mystery.[1]
• Niall named the album Four, for their fourth album in four years together. The band announced it by giving away a song called Fireproof for twenty four hours, and it was downloaded one point one million times.[1]
• In 2015 One Direction broke a Beatles record for the most top ten debuts on the Hot 100 by a band. Perfect entered at number ten in November 2015, the band's fifth top ten debut, one more than the Beatles managed.[1] [2]
• One Direction starred in television adverts for the Pokémon Black and White video games in 2011. It was one of their earliest endorsements. They later had their own toothpaste with Colgate, several perfumes, and a Pepsi advert with the American football star Drew Brees.[1]
• As a teenager Harry worked at a bakery in Holmes Chapel, and the village now runs a Harry walking tour. After thousands of fans visited in 2023, local organisers launched a guided tour in 2024 that takes in the bakery and a viaduct seen in This Is Us.[1]
• Niall taught himself guitar from online videos, using a guitar his brother barely touched. Greg Horan got the guitar for his fifteenth birthday and played it once. It sat around until Niall picked it up.[1]
• Niall once caddied for Rory McIlroy at the Masters golf tournament. In April 2015 he carried McIlroy's bag in the traditional par three contest at Augusta. He later set up a golf management company, Modest Golf.[1] [2]
• After knee surgery in 2014, Niall did his rehab with Chelsea football club at José Mourinho's invitation. His kneecap had troubled him since 2010, and he dislocated it on stage in Antwerp in 2013. He spent about seven weeks training with Chelsea's physios.[1]
• As a small child Liam needed dozens of injections because of a damaged kidney. Doctors found one of his kidneys was scarred and not working properly. He said he had thirty two injections in his arm every morning and evening.[1]
• Liam once sang in front of twenty six thousand people at a Wolverhampton Wanderers match. It was one of his first big crowds, years before The X Factor. He also joined a local theatre company at twelve.[1]
• Louis met James Corden as a child extra on the television drama Fat Friends. Louis and two of his siblings had small roles on the show. Corden became a lifelong friend and later wrote the Best Song Ever video.[1] [2]
• Louis played reserve team football for Doncaster Rovers, wearing the number twenty eight. He signed on non contract terms in 2013 and came on as a substitute in 2014. Twenty eight is also the name of the clothing brand he launched in 2023.[1]
• Louis was kicked out of his first band at fourteen because the guitarist wanted to be the singer. The school band was called The Rogue and played covers of Oasis, Green Day and Blink 182. He said it fuelled his drive to audition.[1]
• Zayn's first tattoo was his grandfather's name, Walter, written in Arabic. He is heavily tattooed and was branded the Bradford bad boy of the band, though he later called the band personas a marketing scheme.[1] [2]
• Zayn is the only artist to win the Billboard Music Award for New Artist of the Year twice. He won it with One Direction in 2013 and again as a solo artist in 2017.[1]
• In 2016, while on a break, One Direction topped Forbes' list of Europe's highest paid celebrities. They earned about ninety million pounds in twelve months, ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo and Adele, thanks to the end of their tour and deals with Pepsi and Colgate.[1]
• Madame Tussauds hired tissue attendants for fans at the band's wax figures after Zayn quit. The figures went up in 2013 and were retired in 2022, six years after the hiatus began.[1]
• Comic Relief once spoofed the band as No Direction, played by Jack Dee, Vic Reeves and Johnny Vegas. Patrick Kielty and Nick Helm completed the line up for Red Nose Day 2015.[1] [2]
• At their final tour show Harry said the band had lasted five years, four months, two weeks and a couple of days. It was Sheffield, on the thirty first of October 2015. Niall recalled that their first ever gig had been in a small nightclub in Scotland.[1]
• One Direction appeared on Sesame Street singing a version of What Makes You Beautiful about the letter U. It aired in 2014, the same year Anna Todd published After, a novel that began life as One Direction fan fiction on Wattpad.[1]
• Their tour manager said the band could never stay in the same hotel for more than three days. Paul Higgins told the BBC in 2012 that hotels loved them for filling every room, then hated them because fans took the place over.[1]
• Night Changes only reached number seven in Britain, but it became their first song to pass a billion Spotify streams. It hit that mark in 2022 and remains their most streamed song, and fans turned to it again after Liam's death.[1]
• Liam secretly volunteered at food banks in London, and it only came out after his death. He donated to the Trussell Trust during the pandemic and helped in person at Euston and Holborn, asking staff not to make a fuss about it.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.