Niall Horan has spoken out about his late bandmate, Liam Payne, and revealed he often questions whether he could have done more for the One Direction legend
Niall Horan has spoken candidly about dealing with the heartache of losing his friend and former bandmate, Liam Payne(Image: Getty Images for iHeartMedia)
Niall Horan has revealed he questions “could I have done more” for Liam Payne. Niall had spent time with his former One Direction bandmate just days before he tragically died in October 2024, aged 31.
Payne fell from the balcony of his third-floor hotel room in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Payne had been in the Latin American country to attend an appointment for an American O visa renewal at the US embassy in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Dinner Party singer Horan had been performing in Latin America on his sold-out tour at the time of seeing Payne.
The pair happily posed for pictures together, which Liam shared on his social media pages, warming the hearts of fans who had longed for a One Direction reunion. In the snaps, both Liam and Niall were beaming from ear-to-ear being in the company of one another again.
In a new interview, he recalled meeting with Payne in the daytime before spending time together in Niall’s dressing room at the arena, but two years on from Liam’s heartbreaking death, Niall has shared how he questions whether more could have been done for the late singer.
“You go through ‘what could I have done if I’d known more?’,” he said, adding: “Should I have dug more into it? Could I talk to other people to get an angle on it? You can go through all sorts of stuff. ‘Cause I’d seen him a couple of weeks previous, I was bit like ‘Jesus’.”
Speaking on the Tommy Tiernan Show, Niall said of seeing Payne: “It was great to see Liam.” Reflecting on the shattering moment he found out Liam had died, Niall continued: ” Tour ends, then I finished in Colombia, then about a week later, went home. I was only home after a big, long stint on the road. End of the tour, and then I was just at home one night.
“I don’t know what day of the week it was. Can’t remember. And just looked down at my phone. I’d gotten a text. I was about to go to sleep, and the phone lights up, and you have a look, one last look. And I was… Pure shock. I knew he’d had a couple of issues, but because I wasn’t around him like I was in previous years, all the time, I didn’t realise to what extent.”
Niall explained he “knew stuff was going on” but wasn’t aware of the depth of Liam’s personal struggles. “You go through how, why, the stages of grief, that I probably really haven’t touched the sides on yet,” Niall said. In a heartbreaking moment, he explained how he grew up with Payne from the age of 16 and faced the ultimate heartache of losing a close friend.
The Irish hitmaker said looking down at his phone on the night Liam died was the ultimate “shock” to see the news. But the struggle became even worse when Horan watched news outlets, seeing his face in pictures with Liam on TV. “I found that very weird,” he said.
“I don’t think I’ve gotten my head around it at all, really,” he commented, saying: “As I said, I’ve known that I shared a room with him with one of those stages at the X Factor. I’ve known him since I was 16 years old. And all of a sudden he’s 32 and… I also just kept thinking of his little son and things like that.”
For Niall, he says he decided to zone out of the news after seeing people he had worked with in One Direction giving interviews about Payne. This was a decision he made in order to focus on himself and process his own grief. “All that stuff is irrelevant to me. I have memories; I want to think about him in that way,” he said.
Two years on, Niall still hasn’t “wrapped his own head” around the tragic news. And part of processing his grief saw Niall pen the song, End of an Era, taken from his upcoming album, Dinner Party, featuring lyrics including: “We had it, pure magic, remember what it was like, time passes, so fast, and I couldn’t tell you goodbye.”
If you have been affected by this story, Cruse Bereavement Support offers free help to make sense of how you are feeling. Click here for their website or call 0808 808 1677.
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