In early December of 1970, John Lennon released his first post-Beatles solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Among its 11 tracks was the song “God”, written in Los Angeles while Lennon was undergoing primal scream therapy and recorded at Abbey Road on the singer’s 30th birthday.
It’s an unusual song for a young man to write—its tone seeming to rest in that ashen space between long night and new morning. Over Billy Preston’s gospel piano line, Lennon’s voice rises, steady and homiletic, to renounce his belief in a series of deities.
There is the I Ching and Buddha; Yoga, Jesus and the Bhagavad Gita; Elvis, Zimmerman, Kennedy. Perhaps most devastating of all for those then mourning the recent demise of the world’s biggest band, there were the Beatles themselves. In the song’s final section, Lennon expands on his position: “Yesterday/I was the Dreamweaver/But now I’m reborn,” he sings. “I was the walrus/But now I am John.”
One Direction were not the Beatles, though they experienced a staggering level of success: 70m records sold worldwide, and the first group in US Billboard chart history to see their first four albums debut at number one. When the band split, in 2016, after six years together, they were the biggest boyband in the world.
That fracturing was always inevitable; the members’ dispersal into solo projects simply part of the narrative arc of a manufactured band. We had seen it before with The Jackson 5 and Take That, the Spice Girls, *NSync and many more, so that even in the infancy of their X Factor days, one contemplated One Direction’s post-band futures.
By the spring of 2017, all five members had released solo singles. One Direction had been unusual in the boyband world in that their music had offered a rockier flavour than many of their pop group predecessors, though their lyrical preoccupations had remained much the same—love, the want and the loss of it. Solo, they began to set out their musical stalls. Zayn Malik had already released the sexually charged R&B hit “Pillowtalk” before the band’s dissolution. Niall Horan followed with lovelorn acoustic number “This Town”. In December 2016, Louis Tomlinson offered a collaboration with EDM DJ Steve Aoki. And Harry Styles unveiled the Bowie-esque “Sign of the Times” the following April.
It was hard to know what Payne’s real musical inclinations might be
Liam Payne was the last to release a solo single in mid-May. It featured Ed Sheeran and the American rapper Quavo and drew on hip-hop, trap, snap and R&B rhythms; Payne singing about the liberation of life after One Direction—fast cars and nightclubs, wine, women, song.
“Strip That Down” would be Payne’s only top-10 solo single. The album that followed, LP1, arrived three years after the band split, and was something of a commercial dud. Critics noted that the album lacked a distinct identity, Payne seemingly dressing up in a different genre for each track and trying desperately to introduce a little raunchiness. It was hard to know what his real musical inclinations might be; it was difficult not to recoil from the awkward erotica. The only possible conclusion from listening to its 17 tracks was that Payne had very little idea who he was.
In the days that followed Payne’s awful and untimely death, on 16th October, the story that first album told still seemed to ring true. There have been endless reports of the singer’s struggles with addiction and mental health issues, with his time in rehab and faltering attempts to make a second record. There was the news he had been dropped by his label, his management, his PR. There was a relocation to America and another imminent reinvention, as a TV talent show judge. Payne’s identity still seemed unmoored. According to fellow guests at the hotel where he died, the singer could be spotted in the lobby telling bystanders how he “used to be in a boyband. That’s why I’m so fucked up…” and announcing “I’m Liam!” to a seemingly impervious crowd.
I had not listened to Payne’s music since its release. Like many, I revisited it with the news of his passing and found myself stuck on a lyric from “Strip That Down”: “You know I used to be in 1D (Now I’m out, free, free)/People want me for one thing (That’s not me).”
It sent me back to Lennon’s more elegant explication of similar emotions; to the thought that there stands only a fine line between renunciation and reinvention, but only one allows a return to the self. That perhaps there really isn’t so much difference between being in a boyband and being a walrus, to being Liam or to now being John.
