Liam Payne had been crying out for help for years.
Perhaps no one could have saved him.
To the casual fan, it may have seemed like the handsome, young One Direction star had it all. He was a dad known to friends as a joyful, optimistic soul. As an ex-member of an iconic band, he had sold an unfathomable 70 million records. Even more rare, as a solo artist, he’d also found success.
ow could someone like that spiral so terrifically out of control that he’d indulge in a reckless drug binge and fall to his death?
A woman, who had been staying at the same Argentinean hotel where Liam died on Wednesday claims to have captured some of his last words.
She says he was acting erratically in the lobby, apparently high out of his mind and, after smashing his laptop, told her: ‘I used to be in a boy band – that’s why I’m so f***ked up.’
‘I used to be…’
Such a tragic admission. And so revealing.
When I heard about Liam’s death, memories of the people I knew from my time as an MTV video jockey in the 90s spun through my mind.
I’d seen plenty of guys go from being stinky string-pluckers playing in bars to overnight global sensations who made grown men cry. I thought of Kurt Cobain, Scott Weiland, Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell, Michael Jackson, and, the sweetest of them all to me, Shannon Hoon.
Shannon, the lead singer for Blind Melon, was just a few years older than me when we met in 1993.
In our first interview, he gave me a hard time for once dismissively referring to him on air as Shannon ‘Who Cares’, after he sang backup in the music video for the Guns N’ Roses song ‘Don’t Cry’.
Before Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’ (Remember the Bee Girl? Nothing more 90s than that!) absolutely exploded, Shannon was a goofy, kind, eager rocker.
I immediately related to his enchanting midwestern energy. I had lived in his hometown of Lafayette, Indiana, the birthplace of Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose (Rose and my brother attended the same preschool).
Shannon felt familiar to me – like a big brother.
But in each of our subsequent meetings, his light dimmed. Within a year, he’d gone from stoked cutie pie to egomaniacal weirdo.
I had been around musicians long enough to see that Shannon was sliding into a chasm. The fame was driving him nuts.
Imagine playing for 80,000 people who love you so much they scream your songs back at you so loud that you can’t even hear your own instruments.
What do you do? Many meet as many girls as possible and keep the parties going as late as they can – night after night, year after year – surrounding themselves with enablers with bags of drugs to make sure the rager keeps raging.
That obviously comes with a price.
In a 2021 interview, Liam Payne said his band managers would stick the One Direction kids in a hotel room for their safety after their unimaginable superstardom became too much.
‘Of course, what’s in the room? Mini bar,’ Payne recalled. ‘So at a certain point, I thought, “Well I’m gonna have a party for one”.’
Fame is lonely. The alcohol and drugs are ruinous. And then it all becomes impossible to live without.
That’s what happened to Shannon. He died of a heart attack in 1995, alone and face down on a tour bus after a cocaine bender.
Like Liam, he left a child behind and an audience that had soured on his latest work.
It’s now reported that Liam’s label, Capitol Records, had dropped him days before his death. His PR manager had resigned earlier this month. And his girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, had left him alone in Argentina.
In the coming days and weeks, we’ll learn the truth about Liam’s demise and how and why he came to fall from that balcony to his death.
But I already know what killed Liam – fame.
