How Liam Payne was candid about his struggles with alcohol and fame
Liam Payne was outspoken about how the global fame of One Direction changed his life and affected his relationship with alcohol, once admitting: ‘I don’t know if I’ve hit rock bottom yet.’
Speaking to Stephen Bartlett on the Diary Of The CEO Podcast in 2021, Liam, admitted: ‘I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be. Where’s rock bottom for me? And you would never have seen it. I’m very good at hiding it’.
‘I don’t even know if I have hit it yet. I can either make that choice now and pick my last moment as my rock bottom or I can make a whole new low.’
He admitted he had suffered for years with ‘social anxiety’ and ‘stress’ from being famous, and discussed the pressure his mental health was under while not having the freedom to go anywhere as a boyband member.
Liam Payne was outspoken about how the global fame of One Direction changed his life and affected his relationship with alcohol , once admitting: ‘I don’t know if I’ve hit rock bottom yet’
The Wolverhampton teenager first auditioned for the X Factor aged 14 before returning two years later when One Direction was formed.
They became one of the biggest pop groups in the world but six years after they were formed, with more than 20 million albums sold, the band were placed on indefinite hiatus.
The band have revealed how they went straight from The X Factor to stardom, with Liam recalling how his dad told him during the build up to the December X Factor final ‘don’t come home until Christmas the day that I left for the show and I never came home.’
Marking One Direction’s 10th anniversary in 2020, Payne shared a screenshot of a text message he sent to his father on the day he joined the group, reading: ‘I’m in a boyband.’
‘What a journey… I had no idea what we were in for when I sent this text to my dad years ago at this exact time the band was formed,’ he said.
Liam had in recent years talked about his journey to sobriety, and how his drinking began when the global mania for the boyband meant they were often stuck in hotel rooms, where alcohol was readily available.
He told Stephen Bartlett on the Diary Of The CEO Podcast: ‘It feels to me, like when we were in the band. The best way to secure us was to lock us in our rooms, and what is in the room? A mini-bar.
‘So I had a party-for-one that seemed to carry on for many years of my life, and then you look back at how long you’ve been drinking? And Jesus Christ that’s a long time, even for someone as young as I am.’
Liam recalled how his dad told him during the build up to the December X Factor final ‘don’t come home until Christmas the day that I left for the show and I never came home’ (pictured on the show aged 16)
He admitted he had suffered for years with ‘social anxiety’ and ‘stress’ from being famous, and discussed the pressure his mental health was under (pictured in 2023)
In multiple interviews Liam explained how he’d used alcohol to cope with both the massive success of One Direction and their subsequent split, telling Men’s Health Australia in 2019 that ‘it’s difficult when you have the level of fame that we had in the band.’
‘There have been a lot of people in trouble with mental health that aren’t really getting the help that they need, and I think that’s a bit of a problem in our industry,’
‘It’s the same s**t that happens to everyone, that’s been happening since the ’70s. You know what the traps are and if you are lucky enough, like me, to be able to get out of that scenario and back into a sense of normality, then you know it’s a bit different.’
Liam went onto compare going on stage and out in public to ‘putting the Disney costume on,’ admitting: ‘I was [drunk] quite a lot of the time because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on’.
‘I mean, it was fun. We had an absolute blast, but there were certain parts of it where it just got a little bit toxic.’
Liam said his drinking began when the global mania for the boyband meant they were often stuck in hotel rooms, where alcohol was readily available
Speaking on This Morning in late 2019, Liam admitted he was as much scared of success as a solo artist as he was of failure.
‘That was the craziest thing, as the band stopped and we had a number of months off, it was almost like going through some weird, early retirement… it’s trying to find out who you are, what’s your purpose.’
‘I went through a number of different bits of therapy. As Strip That Down was coming out I was almost as afraid of its success as I was the failure which isn’t a very comfortable place to be in life.’
He explained how comedian Russell Brand was among those to guide him through those years, telling This Morning:
‘I went away, I had a thing with drink and it was a guy called Chip Somers who got me sober. I was sober for about a year and visited Russell Brand. We went down to meetings together.’ Brand was a patron of the Focus 12 treatment centre, founded by Somers at the time.
‘For anybody who’s having a problem with mental health, the best thing to do is speak to someone. We’re all as crazy as the next person.’
Speaking on This Morning in late 2019, Liam admitted he was as much scared of success as a solo artist as he was of failure
Whilst he was spoke about his year of being sober back in 2019, Liam later admitted his addiction continued during the Covid pandemic.
He went through a mental health crisis which he spoke about in 2021 while appearing on Ant Middleton’s Straight Talking programme.
He said he was ‘quite lucky to be here still’, and added: ‘There’s times where that level of loneliness and people getting into you every day every so often… it’s like, ‘When will this end?’… that’s almost nearly killed me a couple of times.’
‘I’ve been in a bad place, it’s definitely been on the menu a couple of times in my life… when things start to pile on top of each other that’s when it can really get you, you really have to change your view about it. One thing you can control in that situation is you.
‘You just get on with it, there will be another hurdle in a few weeks, a few months or maybe even the next day, you never really know.’
Liam had also reflected on how badly his split from Girls Aloud star Cheryl affected him.
Speaking to Stephen Bartlett on the Diary Of The CEO Podcast in 2021, Liam, admitted: ‘I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be. Where’s rock bottom for me?’
The pair having first met on The X Factor when she was a judge, and amid their whirlwind romnace in March 2017, the couple announced the birth of their son Bear.
The singer would go on to speak proudly of his son in the years to come, saying during one awards ceremony that Bear ‘constantly inspires’ him to be a better person.
But in July 2018, Payne and Cheryl announced their split after two-and-a-half years together, and he was later romantically linked to models Naomi Campbell and Maya Henry.
He opened up about his separation from Cheryl, saying it was tough to break up in the public spotlight and that announcing it was ‘like breaking up twice’.
Speaking to Ant Middleton in 2021 about his son, Liam said: ‘I get lonely if I can’t see Bear for a few days. It seems to the outside world that I have everything but there are so many parts missing. Uncertainty is a big thing in my life, I don’t know how long it will last.
‘Also, my home life situation is problematic and difficult. Distance is difficult. And there are 50 million rumours a week which are hard to ignore. Trust is difficult.
‘Being away from your child out of choice and no choice is difficult to barter with in your head. You know why you’re doing what you’re doing but you wonder what you’re missing out on. Have you got it right?
‘So many people get to the end of their life and go: ‘I wish I’d done this and that.’ I don’t want to be one of those people.’
Liam had also reflected on how badly his split from Girls Aloud star Cheryl affected him
The pair having first met on The X Factor when she was a judge, and amid their whirlwind romnace in March 2017, the couple announced the birth of their son Bear
Liam’s battles continued and in July 2023, he posted a video about spending 100 days in a rehab facility in Louisiana, telling fans he was celebrating six months of sobriety.
He said: ‘I just kind of feel like I’ve got more of a grip on life and everything that was getting away from me, I just feel like I’ve got more of a handle on it.
‘I just needed to take a little bit of time out for myself actually because I kind of became somebody who I didn’t really recognise anymore and I’m sure you guys didn’t either. I was in bad shape up until that point and I was really happy to kind of put a stopper to life and work.’
Liam said he hit ‘rock bottom’ after appearing on Logan Paul’s podcast back in June 2022, and apologised for taking his anger out on everybody else.
Liam thanked his son and his ex-girlfriend Cheryl for supporting his decision to get better. He added that his former bandmates Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik had ‘stuck by me’ and ‘came to my rescue’.
Discussing the infamous podcast, Liam said he ‘came across really big-headed’ and that ‘it was hard for me to watch back’ but that in a way it had ‘saved my life’ by causing him to seek help.
In 2023, he posted a video about spending 100 days in a rehab facility in Louisiana, telling fans he was celebrating six months of sobriety
He explained how it was when he attended a Hans Zimmer concert in January 2023 that he was inspited to give up drinking.
‘I watching this beautiful symphony, I was having a drink, and I thought, ‘You know what? This isn’t really serving me at all. I don’t really need this right now.’ ‘
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever put a drink down and gone to someone else, ‘You finish this, I don’t need this right now.’ And I haven’t picked one up since, which has almost been six months, which I’m excited about.’
‘It’s good. It’s good to be in this position,’ he added. ‘I definitely don’t need those things anymore. The party’s over.’
Despite his July 2023 pledge to continue his sobriety, fans feared for the singer’s health following a string of worrying signs that his life once again had spiralled out of control.
In August last year Liam’s followers shared their concern after he cancelled his tour of South America after being hospitalised with a kidney infection.
Following the news about his condition, his mother Karen shared that she felt ‘helpless’ and was ‘worried sick’.
She told MailOnline at the time: ‘We are all worried sick about it but we just have to get on. It’s horrible – him being all the way over there.
‘All we can really do is sit it out here and hope for the best. There is nothing we can do. We feel helpless.’
Liam opened up about his mental health and revealed doctors diagnosed him with ‘a couple of conditions’ after he spent some time in a wellness clinic in the US last year after hitting ‘rock bottom’.
Last year, Liam’s followers shared their concern after he cancelled his tour of South America after being hospitalised with a kidney infection
Last year Liam opened up about his mental health and revealed doctors diagnosed him with ‘a couple of conditions’ after he spent some time in a wellness clinic
He shared a candid Instagram post to his Story in which he said he was having a tough day and family and friends could see he was still struggling.
Liam described ‘manic’ instances in his life and his difficulty in staying sober during ‘super low’ moments.
In the clip he admitted to having filmed the video numerous times before deleting it, before finally deciding this was the right time to share his story with his fans.
‘I know in my last video I mentioned I’d been diagnosed with a couple of conditions and I will not to go into too much detail, but one of them I have is, there’s a lot of manic things in my life which you guys saw,’ he said.
He continued: ‘But the other side of it is and that kind of feels like when when I would lose my sobriety in these moments that were super low and I felt like that today.
‘And it’s isolating the two things and seeing them separately and like I know what they are now’.
‘Luckily I have some amazing people around me that kind of look after me but I am sure they can see it in me too that I’m ‘not really here.”’
