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While checking into the hospitality area at Glastonbury Festival this summer, the entertainment journalist Ellise Shafer heard a stranger behind her yelling: “Glastoooo!” Only it wasn’t really a stranger, she later wrote. It was an exuberant Louis Tomlinson with a gaggle of friends, hauling a rucksack and primed for a week of live music.
Tomlinson laughs when I tell him about this. The solo artist and former One Direction member has become a regular fixture at Glastonbury – last year he was heralded as a “hero” when he brought a TV to the campsite so revellers could watch England play Slovakia in the Euros. “It’s the kind of place [where] I’m just in a better mood,” he says. “People might see me out and about looking a bit grumpy. At Glastonbury? Definitely not.”
You can understand why he might balk at the idea of going anywhere with large crowds. It’s just over 15 years since One Direction formed on The X Factor and became a global phenomenon, producing four No 1 albums and selling more than 70 million records. Its five members couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed; their hotels were surrounded; cars blockaded; concerts rammed. Almost 10 years after the band split, the jitters remain. “It’s not about how many times you get recognised – it could just be once, or not at all,” explains Tomlinson. “It’s the potential of being.”
When One Direction split in 2016, he and his fellow band member Liam Payne – who died last year after falling from a balcony in Buenos Aires – appeared to be the ones who struggled most. “I felt a bit petulant about it at the time,” Tomlinson told The Independent in 2020. “It actually hit me like a ton of bricks.” Meanwhile, Niall Horan benefited from his Irish cheeky chappy persona, Harry Styles was singled out as “the star” with his rock’n’roll charm, and Zayn Malik – who quit the band in 2015 – had that brooding, mysterious thing going on (at the same time enduring his own struggles with anxiety).
This is Tomlinson’s – indeed any of the former 1D members’ – first newspaper interview since Payne’s death. I’ve been told that he expects questions about Payne; in fact, the only topic I’ve been asked to avoid is Tomlinson’s girlfriend, TV personality Zara McDermott. “I naively thought that, at this point, I’d unfortunately be a little bit more well versed with grief than other people my age,” the 33-year-old Tomlinson says wearily. “I thought that might mean something, but it didn’t at all.” He’s talking about the loss of his mother, Joanna Deakin, who died from leukaemia in 2016, and the death of his 18-year-old sister Félicité from an accidental overdose just three years later. “It’s something I’ll never really accept. I don’t think,” Tomlinson says of Payne’s death. His eyes are watering a little.
It’s easy, he thinks, in the wake of such devastating news, to “point the finger”. After Payne died, fellow celebrities were quick to demand better protection for artists, particularly those thrust into the spotlight at a relatively young age. But in previous interviews, Tomlinson has said he believes the adults working with One Direction did a good job. “I would probably still stand by that statement,” he says. “Obviously, that statement was made before… [and] I can only speak about my own personal experience, [which] was fine.” He sighs. “Look, in any situation similar to this, hindsight is a really powerful thing. I don’t blame anyone for my experience in One Direction. Was it really hard work? Yes. Did we not have enough days off? Yes. But what was really challenging, more than any of those things, was being young and really famous and having people outside the hotels. If you wanted to just go and get a coffee… even wanting to go for a s*** and having to walk [there] with your security. It’s dehumanising, those kinds of things.” Although at least, in the band, they had each other. “No matter what, there was this feeling of togetherness.”
If there is fault to be found, he believes, it lies in the whirlwind of social media comment and online “journalism” that surrounded everything they did. There was a notorious 2022 interview with Payne on Logan Paul’s podcast, Impaulsive, on YouTube, which today makes for an even more uncomfortable watch than it did at the time. Payne, who appeared to be drinking whisky throughout the conversation, received a huge backlash from fans and the media for what were perceived as “arrogant” remarks about his role in the band – claiming that Simon Cowell formed One Direction around him – and for comments he made about his ex-bandmates, Malik in particular. Payne later apologised (“I was so angry at what was going on around me… I took it out on everybody else”) and revealed that he’d spent 100 days in rehab after the interview aired.
“I f***ing forever despise [Logan Paul], horrible, horrible little f***er,” Tomlinson says with quiet venom. “I think that’s also the problem with some of this new ‘media’… I would like to think most journalists” – he corrects himself – “some journalists have a duty of care.” Quite a lot of the fan upset appeared to be motivated by Payne’s claims that he was the de facto band leader. Yet Tomlinson confirms that this was essentially the case. “It was, definitely,” he says. “It was definitely a role that was assigned to him. That is the truth.”
The others looked up to him, he says, including himself (Tomlinson was the eldest of the five), because Payne was already a seasoned performer – “he’d already played at half time [at Molineux, at a Wolverhampton Wanderers game], we’d done s****y school shows” – having been told by Cowell to come back for a second audition after getting more experience. Tomlinson described Payne in a tribute shared after his death as the most “vital” part of the band, and stands by that today. “In between him playing that role and also doing a huge chunk of the songwriting… it’s not even up for debate.”
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What are Tomlinson’s fondest memories of him? He smiles. “So many. Just real, fun moments. Liam would always entertain me. If I was bored and wanted to have a laugh, he would play that role.” Payne always showed up, too, whether at the London premiere of Tomlinson’s 2023 documentary, All of Those Voices, about his life after One Direction, or as his guest when he was a judge on The X Factor in 2018. “This is in no way a comment aimed at the other boys – but I know if it was me, I would have struggled with that idea,” Tomlinson says. “There [would have been] a feeling of inferiority there, because you’re the guest. But any opportunity Liam got like that, he was always, always there for me. Even if he might have been struggling, he put himself second and still turned up. Those moments are really testament to the truth of who he was as a person.”
Any opportunity he got, Liam was always there for me
Did his death bring the band’s surviving members closer, in any way? “Definitely,” he says. He gets mildly frustrated with the cycle they end up in, where they will text, saying they need to meet up, then never manage to bring it off. I think this is a plight affecting most thirtysomethings, I reassure him. “Yeah, and the best kind of friends are the ones where, when you eventually do meet up, it’s like no time has passed,” he agrees. “It’s also just amazing to see everyone doing so well in their own right.” He loved Malik’s last record, 2024’s criminally underrated, Americana-influenced Room Under the Stairs: “Everyone got to see a side to him that I’ve always seen.”
Tomlinson has his own new solo record to celebrate. We’ve met not in a plush hotel suite or swanky restaurant booth, but at The Independent’s headquarters in central London. It’s a small but significant sign of how down to earth he’s managed to stay, for all that fame. He pulls up in a blacked-out people carrier and strides up the steps, offering a polite handshake. Clutching his visitor’s pass, he walks with me and his publicist through the lion’s den (the newsroom) with his shoulders slightly hunched, head down. Once we’re in the soundproofed seclusion of a podcast studio, though, he unfolds himself – stretching out and reclining against his chair, wearing artfully ripped jeans, white trainers and a smart zip-up jacket.
His new single, “Lemonade”, the first to be released from his just-announced third solo album How Did I Get Here?, is a big surprise given the rock and indie-leaning sound of his 2020 solo debut, Walls, or the 2022 follow-up, Faith in the Future. Both it and most of the eight other songs I’m sent from the record show Tomlinson embracing the pop music he seemed eager to shake off after One Direction split, despite his evident skill in crafting a hook or memorable lyric (the band co-wrote many of their biggest hits). With its fizzing funk-riff swagger, “Lemonade” is a fantastic thirst-quencher of a track that’s not dissimilar to the euphoric pop-rock Styles excels at. It feels as though Tomlinson has finally found his own sound.
It’s taken a while. The critical consensus around his first two albums was that he had become lost in a “a sea of influences”, from Oasis and Snow Patrol to Arctic Monkeys. Critics complained that it had become difficult to discern who he was, artistically or otherwise.
“I appreciate you being honest about that,” Tomlinson says when I bring this up. “It’s definitely something that I’ve been aware of.” When he first emerged blinking from One Direction, his instinct had been to “push back” and run as far as he could in the opposite direction. “But actually, the most confident thing I could [have done] was to really embrace those pop sensibilities and bring more people to the party. I’m ready now to accept what I’m great at, which is a cool thing to be able to say out loud, to be honest.”
I’m ready now to accept what I’m great at, which is a cool thing to be able to say out loud, to be honest
Tomlinson and I are the same age, but it feels as though he’s lived a few extra lives. During our conversation, I’m moved by how thoroughly decent he seems, and how surprisingly open he is, despite having every reason to clam up or be a bit prickly. Many of his friends are getting married, having kids. He’s a father himself to nine-year-old Freddie – born from Tomlinson’s brief relationship with Californian stylist Briana Jungwirth – and spends a lot of time in Los Angeles, where Freddie lives with his mum. “I’m pretty much playing full-time dad when I’m out there,” he says. “I don’t do loads of work or even [much] socialising.” Freddie is “good as gold”, according to Tomlinson, who loves dropping him off at school. “I’m still the youngest dad there,” he says, flashing a smug grin. “It kills me in the mornings though… I’ve never been great at early starts.”
Despite being three albums deep into his own solo project, he’s still afflicted by feelings of imposter syndrome. But he knows he has enough love from his fan base not to worry about them too much. “On my rainiest day, vocally, performance-wise, my fans are still going to be there for me,” he says. “I just got a cover shoot for Rolling Stone UK, and they told me that I was one of the most requested people to be on [the cover]. I wonder if I would have got that gig if my fans didn’t fight so hard for it. They get me what they think I deserve, which is beautiful. It’s really lovely.” That same humility shows up again when he speaks about the fellow artists and producers he got to collaborate with on this record, who helped bring a new vulnerability to his songwriting. “When I entered the music industry, I was in a band where we were working for each other as well as ourselves,” he says. “I think I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.”
‘How Did I Get Here?’, the new album by Louis Tomlinson, is out on 23 January 2026. The single ‘Lemonade’ is out now