Liam Payne wasn’t a perfect celebrity. That’s why grieving his death is complicated

I wasn’t a One Direction fan, having moved on from my boyband-loving phase by the time they were formed in 2010, though I appreciated their outsized impact on music and pop culture. Neither did I follow Liam Payne’s solo career after the band split in 2016. 

But the news of Payne’s death on Oct 16 after he fell from a hotel balcony sent me reeling from shock in a way no other celebrity death has. It wasn’t just a life that had ended, but an era he once represented. 

The latter, in my view, complicates the mourning process, as evident from the immediate reactions about the life he lived. 

LIAM PAYNE THE TEEN IDOL

With Payne’s level of fame, he was more than “just another celebrity”, and One Direction, more than a boyband that fans adored with an all-consuming force. They had a generation-defining influence on how we consume music and pop culture.

Fan obsession over the five boys, which coincided with the start of burgeoning social media use, didn’t only propel the band to a magnitude of global success previously unimaginable. The fandom, known as Directioners, practically shaped the culture of parasocial relationships as we know it today.

One Direction’s music and the resulting online fan communities gave many a safe space to discover themselves while growing up. A shared sentiment following Payne’s death is that these fans are also grieving for their younger selves, for whom his band once meant everything. 

If Payne had solely remained an idol in everyone’s eyes, his untimely demise at 31 years old might just be seen as a tragic celebrity death. It’s easy to mourn someone polished and perfect after all. 

But on top of being an idol, he was human. And if online chatter is anything to go by, society hasn’t quite figured out how to mourn both versions of a celebrity at once.

LIAM PAYNE THE MAN

In the months leading up to his death, Payne was accused of allegedly abusive actions in a previous relationship, following a novel published by his ex-fiancée Maya Henry.

Although “a work of fiction”, the storyline was “inspired by her relationship with Payne”, according to US-based pop culture publication Vulture. It features a popstar love interest who is “verbally abusive and physically violent”, and who coerces the protagonist into getting an abortion. 

Needless to say, fans put two and two together. Many wanted Payne to be held accountable for his alleged actions, their anger no doubt partly because he no longer appeared to be the cheerful and carefree boyband member they remembered him to be. But he never publicly responded to the novel, even as he remained in the public eye.

The allegations, while extremely serious, were admittedly not the first chink in his armour.

Post-One Direction, Payne was vocal about his struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, as well as severe suicidal ideation. He also admitted disdain for his early fame despite the success it brought him.

Payne 2.0 seemed flawed, messy, and at times, awful. His career trajectory felt hard to watch, not least because the boy once thought invincible by millions was in fact a completely fallible man. 

As far as some were concerned, the death of Payne happened way before Oct 16. So when he died, the intense grief from losing a beloved idol, once an inseparable part of formative life experiences, was made complicated by having to mourn the human he’d become.

GRIEF'S GREY AREAS

But grief doesn’t care for logic or picking a side. It knows that two things can be true at once; that an individual can be adored by some while being horrible to others, and that one person’s memory doesn’t invalidate another person’s reality or vice versa.

Grief simply shows up and demands to be felt all round. It is the most straightforward and complicated thing at once – and struggling to embrace two seemingly disparate truths is often the point.

In fact, Payne himself knew a thing or two about the struggle, and it’s his visible constant inner conflict that I found most relatable. Of all things to have in common with a former One Direction member, we were diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adulthood. 

The term ADHD is, for those with the inborn neurodevelopmental condition, a misnomer. In many of our experiences, it’s fundamentally an inability to regulate oneself in all aspects – attention, interest, thoughts, emotions, behaviours – that creates a disordered life.

Many of us also find life transitions, no matter good or bad, an overwhelming challenge. And leaving one of the biggest boybands in the world then trying to establish a solo career, while learning to accept that one may never again come remotely close to a similar success, is as monumental a change as it gets. 

When I listened to Payne’s 2021 interview on The Diary Of A CEO podcast, I heard a man struggling with regulating himself and life’s extreme highs and lows that came as a result.

He was achingly candid and self-aware on a range of topics, from the trappings of achieving early success in life to his inability to be alone. His answers painted a picture of someone in the depths of self-loathing who’d occasionally glimpsed self-acceptance only to have it slip away time and again.

Above all, he sounded like a prisoner of his own demons, whose only escape from his mind was often to fight – himself and others. And while I might disagree with his methods, I wish I could say I didn’t understand the exact place they stemmed from.

Admittedly, it would be nicer if we could chiefly remember Payne for being a teen idol, one whose culture-defining band gave us countless core memories, avoiding his blemished behaviour post-One Direction. It would also be easy just to condemn him for being an alleged abuser, unworthy of mourning when he supposedly inflicted pain on others. 

Or maybe it’d be most convenient to place the blame for Payne’s death squarely on the music industry and its blatant disregard for artistes’ well-being. 

The issue is that both idolising and demonising a celebrity are equally dehumanising, even as I understand there isn't one "right" way to grieve. 

And yet, for all Payne's apparent struggles to confront himself in life, perhaps the least we could do is finally see him in death for the human he may have been, rather than the idol we wished him to remain – even if we might not like the multitudes within a single person we end up looking at.

Grief is inherently complex, as was Payne, but denying his full humanity for our own comfort would only be a major disservice to his legacy.