One Direction: Who We Are: Our Official Autobiography by One Direction
I’m really excited to be performing in stadiums that are substantially bigger than any venues we’ve played before. On certain slower songs you get a little bit of time to think and look out at the crowd to soak up what’s going on. I know there will be times when I’m looking out on this tour and thinking, This is insane! Looking at the size of all the venues, I think that will be the best feeling pretty much every night! I can’t wait.
I’m often asked when this whole crazy One Direction experience started to sink in. My honest answer? I don’t think it ever sinks in. I’d see myself as a weird person if it did. To me, it would be strange if I ever found this ‘normal’, because it’s not normal. Nothing we’re doing is normal.
When people get bored of One Direction and start throwing tomatoes instead of underwear at us, then that’ll be the time to put down our guitars and go home! For now, though, we’re here to stay.
While working on this book, looking back on what’s happened has been quite a process. Like I said before, I don’t wanna give myself the tag of being driven or ambitious. I didn’t see this opportunity and think, That’s mine for the taking. It was much more spontaneous than that. I’m here right now and if I’m being completely frank with you, I don’t know how I got here. I’m just thankful that I did get here and it’s sick that I am. I’m grateful for everything that I’ve been blessed with in this band. I’m just enjoying it, and I’m as bamboozled as everyone else as to why One Direction are the scale that we are.
I’m not suggesting in any way that we haven’t worked for our success. We have, very hard. Nothing in life lands in your lap. From getting up early that day for the X Factor audition to our first 2014 stadium show when we walked out having spent months in planning and then rehearsals, it’s an intense – at times extreme – amount of work. I do have to work very hard to be in the position that I’m in. So have the rest of the band and everyone around One Direction – we’ve all put in so many hours and so much effort. At the same time, so many other people have gone out and worked and got in these positions and gone to interviews and auditions and worked hard every day, but they haven’t had the same level of success. So in terms of processing exactly how successful we are, that’s the difficult part for me. I don’t really understand that bit if I’m honest, but I do understand that this band has certainly put in the hard work to have earned it.
As I said earlier, as a kid I was a dreamer. I’ve always believed that I wanted to do something a little bit extra with myself. I don’t know why I thought that. Maybe it was my parents always fuelling those dreams, maybe it was something inside me. I don’t know. I just know I had dreams. Luckily, thanks to One Direction and our fans, I’m now living the dream.
It’s no secret that I was a lively kid who loved performing. I always wanted to be the centre of attention, the class clown, if you like. I come from a big family and I loved to be in the thick of everything that was going on. At school I wasn’t great ’cos I didn’t put my mind to it. It was the same with my part-time jobs. I got sacked from them for being largely disinterested. It was also the same with college. I hadn’t taken school that seriously because I was just in it for the doss, but somehow I got through my GCSEs fine. Naturally, I thought, I’ll do the same at A Level, but as so many people find out to their cost, you can’t do that!
My heart wasn’t really in it and I just wanted to go in to college to see my mates. I loved those times, but I just wasn’t the teachers’ favourite. Some of the best years of my life were at school and college, and I miss that big time. I just didn’t really apply myself academically. However, I clearly remember having a fire in my belly for singing and performing. I never gave anything other than 100 per cent in that respect. Looking back now, I can see that I just needed to find something that I was passionate about.
Obviously, being in One Direction means I travel the world in a way that I could never have thought possible when I was a kid, even though I was always keen to expand my horizons beyond my hometown of Doncaster. All through my teenage years, teachers used to ask me what plans I had for a career and I’d say, ‘I kind of assume I’ll head off to university and after that probably become a teacher, or maybe do something with sport somewhere.’ I loved where I lived, but I was very aware that there weren’t necessarily too many opportunities in Doncaster – so I might have to move on somewhere else. Never in a million years would I have expected to be travelling as much as I do now, though!
From as early as I can remember, I enjoyed being the centre of attention!
Making plans in the sand for how to build my first house. On holiday in Bournemouth.
Defo cut my fringe myself!
The original hangover baby.
With my sister Lottie.
Loving tea at a young age!
Buzzing in the bath!
Me and my lovely nan.
Me and a random dog!
I’ve been called ambitious and driven, but I never sat down and planned any of this. I’m not the sort of person who thinks ahead about my life in that way. I don’t over-analyse my options. If I look back now and think about myself as a 14-year-old kid doing music and performing in local productions, I never for one second took it so seriously that I thought I absolutely had to make it. I was just performing because I enjoyed it. To be honest, I loved it.
One thing I definitely had, though, was persistence. I suppose I get that from my mum, who always encouraged me to do what I wanted. She’d always say, ‘Louis, just go for it, give it your best shot!’ My mum’s very ambitious, to be fair, and I do get a lot of qualities from her. I started noticing how things worked out well if I really pushed hard, so it became kind of a self-fulfilling way of approaching my life. Once I set my mind on something I’m very stubborn and really want to achieve that goal. I’ve proved to myself in so many instances in life that persistence is very important, and I also think that’s a big part of our success in One Direction.
Back in Doncaster, I enjoyed my time in a small band, as well as at music college and the various productions I’d been involved in locally, plus I’d picked up a few small parts in TV shows like Fat Friends and Waterloo Road, all of which really encouraged me to keep going. Each time I had some small success it would make me even more persistent, just adding fuel to the fire. I used to say, ‘I just love performing, Mum. I want to just keep doing this as much as I can.’ I was really enjoying being on stage – I was passionate about it and saw that world as an opportunity to get myself noticed outside of my local area.
That was my thinking behind the decision to go for The X Factor. As you probably know, I failed to get past the first producers’ audition on my first attempt in 2009, but to be honest that rejection just made me even more determined to push on. When I went back the following year I was ready to give it everything. The previous year’s disappointment was completely forgotten and if anything just motivated me more. Obviously you queue for hours for that show and while you do you get talking to people, some of whom would ask me why I was entering. I’d always reply, ‘I want to get an opinion from Simon, I want to know what he thinks of my voice, what he thinks of me and whether he thinks I have something.’ Once I was through the initial producers’ auditions, I’d hear what he had to say about me – a genuinely weighty opinion as to whether I had anything worth pursuing.
For me that whole X Factor ride just went so fast. It was an amazing experience but because it was also such a blur, when you look back and reflect on those times it kinda feels like it’s hard to do it justice because so much happened in such a small stretch of time. That entire phase of my life was just the most incredible period. When I try and think back to the house and all the things that went on, I can recall some of those moments but I know I’ve forgotten loads more! If I had a kid who fancied having a go at The X Factor, I’d definitely recommend that show because there’s nothing else out there that offers people that kind of an opportunity. I was just a kid from a little school. I took my chance – and here I
Mind you, I’ll be totally honest, there were times during The X Factor when I didn’t feel so positive. Obviously, the show is pre-recorded weeks in advance so I’d been telling all my friends that I’d made it through to the live part of the show in this new band. The problem was that week after week of the auditions went by – and I was nowhere to be seen! I could tell that people were beginning to think I was just messing about. Then finally, in the last week at Manchester, they showed Harry. I thought, At last! Here I go! But they didn’t show me at all. I was really embarrassed and just assumed that everyone would think I was a time-waster. Some of my mates had previously booked a holiday to Magaluf and they’d been taking the mickey out of me for going to Boot Camp rather than going on holiday. I didn’t mind that ’cos they were just messing about, really.
Then, during Boot Camp, they hardly showed me again, at least not until the band was put together. Even at that point I was watching the show and wondering, Everyone will be thinking, ‘Who is this kid that has just popped up outta nowhere with his hat on?’ So that was a weird time, being so excited knowing that I was in One Direction but contrasting that with hardly being seen on the show at all and worrying what people would be thinking.
If I thought the early shows were nerve-wracking, they were nothing compared with the extremes of emotion I felt when I was rejected from the Boys category and then suddenly put back into the competition in this band. I’ve spoken about that important moment in my life many times, obviously, but what I’ll add is that the rejection and then the second chance was exactly the sort of opportunity that my persistent nature craved. That was a fantastic offer that I fully intended to grab with both hands. It was so exciting, that second chance, so I knew that I had to persist – keep trying my best, keep having a go, as my mum would say. I was determined to put absolutely everything into this unexpected shot they’d given me.
The X Factor is an overwhelming experience, and we were all young lads trying to soak up what was happening to us. So it really helped that there was such an immediate chemistry between the five of us. The environment on that show is so intense that I don’t think the band would have worked if we’d been struggling to get on. But we just clicked, just like that. When we all hung out at Harry’s step-dad’s bungalow that was definitely a time when One Direction began to form this bond – this closeness – that we still enjoy today. Straight away I was pretty impressed with how we were all just chatting to each other so naturally, because we’d literally shared maybe ten conversations with each other before we came to the bungalow. We stayed there a few days, and it was just like staying with your mates from back home. We were playing PlayStation, messing about, watching TV – just having a great laugh. I’d be seeing all this kicking off and laughing so much, and all the time I just had a feeling there was something there. I don’t know that I’d call it a spark, but there was definitely something there ...
Perhaps not surprisingly, I clearly remember signing our record deal. After the show had finished we went into Syco’s office for the first time but it was different to how I’d imagined. I’m not sure what I expected, to be fair. Maybe something more crazy and ‘showbiz’, I guess, but it was just a really nice office. Mind you, it was still pretty cool. There were gold discs of all these amazing artists on the walls, so it wasn’t exactly drab! I was like, ‘Look at this, lads! They did that album ... and that one!’ It was just hit records everywhere.
We walked in all wide-eyed and had this meeting, signed the deal and then left pretty soon after. It wasn’t really until later on that I appreciated precisely how HUGE that moment was in my life. One Direction is very much like that most of the time – because everything’s been so frantic for us from day one, with so many massive, mad moments, I find I have to really zone in to think about something in particular.
Recording our début album was very interesting because it was an experience filled with ‘firsts’ for some of us. For a start, even flying to various countries was something that not all of us had done. I’d been on a plane when I was four, but mostly I’d only ever been to France on holiday every other year – and even then we used to get the ferry over. I’d never been anywhere like LA. It was a world away from my home, obviously. A few of my mates had been to Disney World in Florida, but we never did that when I was a kid. So you can imagine that LA was a bit of a culture shock for a 19-year-old lad from Doncaster.
It was absolutely amazing, a blessing, and I felt really privileged to be there. Our hotel was more glamorous than anything I’d ever stayed in, and I was so excited to think that if everything went well there could be more of this. I said to all the lads at various points, ‘If the band goes well and we work really hard, this might be a taste of things to come for us.’ Despite all the craziness around us at the time and the difficulty I sometimes have in remembering specific events, I clearly remember feeling conscious of always working hard, seizing this opportunity that had been given to us.
LA was crazy, but not as nuts as when we landed back at Heathrow. Luckily for us, really early on in our career we’d seen fans outside studios and hotels, maybe a hundred or sometimes even two hundred, so we were kinda expecting a few faces at the airport. But what greeted us was just this mass of people, a sea of fans going completely mad. I was like, ‘Jeez, is this for real?’ We’d not seen anything like that before and the fact it was in England made it feel all the more special. I remember I got my hoody sleeve ripped clean off, so I just dumped it and I told myself, Keep running! Then these police officers said, ‘Lads, over here, get in here!’ and we were dragged into a tiny office, but all these fans were surrounding it and banging on the walls and windows. It was so intense.
Eventually, we made our get-away and once we’d got out of there and were sitting in this police van, we just sat there looking at each other. You could see we were all shell-shocked – our faces were just saying, ‘What the hell just happened there, lads?’ Looking back, that was the first sign that the hysteria could get seriously out of control. It was a real shock to the system.
Those early recording sessions were a time of strange contrast as well, though. I’m generally a very confident person and enjoy feeling positive about experiences. So it might surprise you to hear that away from the incredibly exciting events that were sweeping over the band seemingly every day – or at times every hour – I was actually struggling with issues of self-confidence. Like I say, that might seem a bit of an odd thing to say for someone who’s known for having bagfuls of confidence – which I do have, I admit – but I’m just being honest with you. Let me explain.
For the whole of The X Factor I didn’t have a solo. As you know, I like being the centre of attention – I don’t mind admitting that. So being on the ultimate fringe was a tough pill for someone who likes the limelight to swallow at first. During the show we’d do a performance and then stand in front of the judges. They’d be saying all this stuff about our vocals or whatever, but I’d just be listening to Cheryl or Simon or whoever and thinking, That isn’t really directed at me anyway, is it?
When we got to the recording sessions for the first album that situation deteriorated, to be honest. Obviously, the début sessions in LA and Sweden were exciting and also very challenging. I’d never been in a recording studio before, so when we got there it was massively intimidating. I was less confident about my vocal ability than some of the other lads in the band. In fact, at times I was terrified and didn’t have any confidence at all. It’s such a random thing: you enter a booth with these high-profile producers who you’ve never met before and they’re like, ‘Okay, Louis, sing!’ Normally, I’d be a little apprehensive, but my confidence would pull me through and I’d just have a go. But there was something deeper going on behind those nerves.
I’m being really frank and honest with you here. That period was actually really tough. I was clearly delighted to be in the band and have this amazing opportunity, but at the same time I was stru
In the end I decided to do what I knew had worked in the past – be persistent. I was determined to keep working hard, carry on contributing and just ensure that I made myself absolutely essential to the creative and commercial success of the band. It probably wasn’t until the recording sessions for the second album that I really started to feel comfortable with my vocals. The lads were massively helpful too, they would always boost my confidence, encourage me and just back me all the way. ‘Nice one, Louis, that was wicked, your voice was amazing on that song ...’ all that kind of stuff. That helped enormously.
Looking back on that early phase, having to question myself like that has ultimately helped me because it made me work harder and prove I deserved to be in this band. Those self-doubts made me practise my vocals more and more, and pushed me to stand up and be counted. I feel lucky to have experienced that difficult phase and worked my way through it. Now I still work hard and enjoy making a big contribution to the success of the band.
Before you feel too sorry for me, though – honestly! – let me tell you that aside from my self-doubts about the vocal situation, those very early days in the band were just the most insane period. We had all these PAs and small club gigs, then the X Factor tour – it really was a whirlwind. Getting to know the lads, being bombarded by all this stuff we had to do every day, it was so exciting!