Liam Payne shot to fame at a young age because of One Direction, there’s no denying that. In fact, he, Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik can all thank the band for getting them to where they are today.
However, since Liam has pursued his solo career, he has been pretty vocal about how being in the band wasn’t that easy on him.
He has admitted to having mental health issues and drinking problem because of it in the past, and now, he’s said that being part of it made him “a little bit nuts.”
““Fame made me a little bit nuts and distracted me a lot from the person I was,” he told #legend magazine. “And it pissed me off in the end, because it was like, ‘You could have been this guy, but you chose to do this.’ Nobody really knew anything about me. I put on a front that wasn’t really me.”
He continued, “I remember the day we finished, because of the place I was in, I was quite happy that we had a break. I said to the person with me at the time, ‘Thank god I don’t have to play that person again for a long time.’ It was exhausting and I couldn’t keep up with myself.”
The band has been on an official hiatus for about two years now, and Liam admits that it’s taken him this long time to nearly get back to the guy he was before entering X Factor.
“Now that I’ve had my time away, you slowly, naturally become the person you were before you started, but with a lot more knowledge,” he explained. “So I feel a lot more myself than I ever did before, rather than being a part of something and having a part to play or treading on eggshells around someone. And when I sat back and thought about all the silly things I might have said and done wrong — not that I have any regrets, because I think whatever happened, happened — I think that now is the time to not be that person.”