This time nine years ago, five teenage boys’ dreams were in tatters after being rejected from the X Factor .
But determined not to let a good-looking gang go to waste, show boss Simon Cowell and his genius decided to put solo hopefuls Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson together.
It took the lads just five minutes to agree to his plan and have another crack at the competition – this time in the groups category.
They would go on to be one of the most successful boybands of the century, selling out stadiums and dominating the charts for five years before splitting in an explosion of bitterness and animosity.
But with no experience of harmonies, group singing or even each other, even then Liam wondered what they were really getting into.
“We had seen each other at Bootcamp and got on well, and Niall and I had shared a room. But we were competition then, and at the back of the minds we knew were against each other,” Liam would later recall.
“So it was strange when we were put together and my first thought was, ‘How are we going to make this work when we don’t know each other? It was such a leap of faith.”
A fractious start
Desperate to catch up with the other bands, the newly-formed five-piece spent an intense two intense weeks practising in a bungalow at the bottom of Harry’s step-dad’s garden in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire.
But contrary to their bright white smiles and boyish banter, their very different personalities were already beginning to show, laying the foundations for the resentment, jealously and anger that would one day cause the group to implode.
“We used to be at each other’s throats on the X Factor,” Louis admitted on their This Is Us DVD of his clashes with Liam.
“Whenever I wanted to do anything slightly mischievous, he was always the daddy.”
“Me and Louis did not get on at all,” Wolverhampton-born Liam agreed. “We were two completely different characters. There was one point where I literally wanted to whack him.”
Nevertheless, they sailed through the live shows and came third in the final before scoring a record deal with Cowell, who for them made n exception of only signing the winning act.
A mysterious fall out
By the time they scored their first number one with What Makes You Beautiful in September 2011, Harry and Louis were living as housemates in a rented £3million North London flat in the same block where Ashley Cole and Cheryl once met.
Then suddenly at the start of 2012 they allegedly stopped talking and moved out.
“Apart from Harry and Louis, no one knows exactly what caused the falling out — they didn’t even tell the other boys the full details,” a source told The Sun at the time.
“But it was very serious and their friendship has never recovered. Everyone involved in the band is well aware of the animosity between them.
“It’s been central to everything else that came next with the band because there was suddenly a massive divide.”
From that point on Harry apparently refused to even travel with Louis and the fall-out would become so serious that bosses reportedly had to find a way to make their last three albums without the boys having to spend any time together in the studio.
However, Niall dismissed the claims, telling fans not to believe the reports.
“We stand strong as a band and we’re brothers,” he tweeted.
Those ‘gay sex’ rumours
One theory was that the ‘Larry Stylinson’ fan fiction depicting the pair as lovers had pushed them apart.
Louis, in particular, was extremely sensitive about the claims and admitted the speculation about their sexuality ‘created an atmosphere’.
“People can believe what they want, but it comes across as a little bit disrespectful to the ones that I love, like (girlfriend) Eleanor (Calder),” he said.
“I’m so protective over things like that, about the people I love. So it created this atmosphere between the two of us.”
Zayn told how Harry and Louis had even dialled back their physical friendship in an attempt to stop the rumours.
“It’s not funny, and it still continues to be quite hard for them. They won’t naturally go put their arm around each other because they’re conscious of this thing that’s going on, which is not even true,” he said.
While Harry likes to keep people guessing about his sexuality, refusing to put a label on it, Louis has categorically said he is heterosexual.
And he was raging when a cartoon featured in HBO show Euphoria depicted a sex scene between him and Harry last month.
“I can categorically say that I was not contacted nor did I approve it,” he raged on Twitter , with a source telling The Sun he was ‘angered’ that an ‘awkward’ situation had been made worse.
Drug scandal
Whatever the cause of the tension, the rift only grew wider when Zayn and Louis were filmed smoking what appeared to be cannabis in the back of an SUV en route to a concert in Peru in 2014.
Narrating from behind the camera as he filmed Zayn lighting what appeared to be a joint, Louis could be heard saying, “So here we are, leaving Peru. Joint lit. Happy days!”
Talking about Zayn taking his warm-up ‘seriously’, he continued, “One very very important factor of Zayn’s warm up of course if Mary J herself. In fact I will present it to him now for some fantastic singing.”
Straight-laced Harry – who wasn’t even much of a drinker – was apparently ‘furious’ they’d taken the shine off the start of their UK stadium tour with their ‘stupid and reckless’ behaviour.
“Harry is annoyed about the whole debacle. This should be one of the biggest weeks of the band’s career… Instead it has been taken over by this controversy,” an insider told The Sun.
“Despite Harry’s reputation, he’s incredibly professional and mature, and not into these sorts of antics,” the source added.
Booze battles
It wasn’t just Louis and Zayn who were in Harry’s bad books.
Liam’s partying was so out of control that Harry reportedly refused to go socialise with the band unless good guy Niall was there to keep the peace.
The pressure of spending two solid years on the road coupled with rumours about their future caused Liam to have a backstage meltdown in October 2015 with the band forced to cancel the gig in Belfast.
“The pressures of fame and being on the road for two years have made Liam ill,” a source told The Sun of the star, who would go on to admit fame ‘nearly killed me’.
“He was devastated about letting everyone down, especially the fans, but he wasn’t physically able to get on stage. He had a complete meltdown.”
On another occasion he turned up to a fan event so drunk that it finally gave him a wake-up call.
“I’m not afraid to say that I actually went through a pretty bad [drinking] stage,” he told Attitude magazine.
“There were just a few times that I went over the limit with things and then I had to pull it back.
“I was very fortunate that I had lots of great people around me who said to me, ‘Look Liam, you need to chill out a bit now.'”
Admitting he used alcohol to cope with the strain of performing near-constant touring, he said being drunk was like putting on a Disney costume before stepping out on stage.
“Underneath the Disney costume I was pissed quite a lot of the time because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on,” he told Men’s Health.
“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.”
The pact
The band was fraying at the seams. Zayn was constantly in the headlines, accused of cheating on then-fiancée Perrie Edwar – which he vehemently denied.
There were rumours that he wanted out of 1D – despite the deal they were said to have made to release five albums and a greatest hits record before going on a ‘hiatus’.
But Zayn blindsided everyone by suddenly quitting in March 2015 after a concert in Hong Kong.
In a statement he later admitted had nothing to do with him, he claimed he wanted to be a ‘normal 22- year old’.
“I wasn’t going to spend another minute doing something which made me ill and which I no longer believed in,” he said of his shock exit.
Harry was seen openly crying on stage during their performance the next night.
But behind the scenes, the lads were reportedly furious.
“The others knew Zayn would have a head start by leaving first, like Robbie Williams did when he quit Take That,” said a pal.
“It was frustrating to them as Zayn only had to hang on in there a few months and 1D would have gone on their long break united.”
Zayn would later go so far as to claim he’d wanted to leave the band from the very beginning and that he hated their music.
Friends no more?
Meanwhile, absence has only made the feud grow stronger, particularly between Louis and Zayn after the latter failed to support him on the X Factor following his mum’s death in December 2016.
“I had a couple of calls with him after I lost my mum and all the boys had agreed to come to that performance and he didn’t show, so that really bugged me,” he said on the Dan Wootton podcast.
“It was just seeing everyone there – Harry, Niall and Liam – that was what I needed that night, that support,” he said. “So on the other end of the spectrum it kind of really showed. So, eh, I hope he’s alright, but…”
Niall admits he doesn’t even have Zayn’s number and that he’s constantly changing it, while Zayn sniped that he didn’t ‘really’ speak to Harry when they were in the band so didn’t expect to have a friendship after.
“I ain’t spoke to any of them for a long time, to be honest with you. That’s just the way it is,” he told Vogue.
“There’s things that happen and things that were said after I left…Snide things. Small things that I would never have expected.”
So could they ever reunite?
While Louis says it’s ‘inevitable’, Harry reportedly isn’t on the same wavelength.
“Since stepping away from 1D Harry has really enjoyed life outside that pop bubble,” a source said.
“And right now he has absolutely no desire to get 1D back together.”
Source: https://www.irishmirror.ie/showbiz/celebrity-news/drugs-meltdowns-gay-sex-rumours-18668687