One Direction

I have to say, though, social media doesn’t create itself. We had this army of fans out there on Twitter and Facebook, just constantly posting stuff, and the speed and scale of how they networked news about One Direction out there was ridiculous. We’re so grateful for that. We know how much energy people have put in – and still do – to this band. That’s never underestimated.

I might not agree all the time, but I do get where it comes from.

That’s always a very cool part of being in this band. I feel like whatever happens in the future and however things go, we’ll always have it in common that we went through this together.

I enjoyed school but I didn’t have dozens of mates, just a couple of really good ones.

I like the fact that tattoos allow me to say something without physically saying something – you know what I mean? I’m not one for making big, loud announcements, drawing attention to myself, all that.

I knew straight away that I was gonna get on with him, ’cos Louis is just one of the lads.

Fortunately, we had a secret weapon – our amazing fans! One Direction fans are unique – they really are an army championing us all around the world. Back in the really early days, the power of our fans on social media was staggering. We would all constantly recognise that – ‘Can you quite believe what these fans are doing for us?!’ There’s a saying, ‘right place, right time’, and I definitely think we benefited from that in terms of our fans and the opportunity for them to talk about us online. That was a huge factor in our early success.

I’ve a theory about social media and our generation. I don’t want to get too deep here, but at the same time I think it’s an important reason why One Direction have enjoyed so much success. Plus I want to acknowledge the role our fans have played in our story. Ours is a whole new generation of kids who feel like this is our era. The people in each decade have their own style, and when we started off as a band the kids in our generation had social media – that was ours. There was that sense of ‘We’re gonna take control of all this. Now this is our time.’ That’s how this generation deals with stuff in our lives – everything we do is based around our social networks. Every opinion we have now is gonna be put on social networks and this is how we tell other people about every band we like. We all connect with the whole world through Twitter, Facebook and more recently Instagram.

All these things came together just before and then during the time we formed as a band. What that meant for One Direction was that when our fans started to talk about us online early on, the whole world heard them talking.

Once our fans started discussing us on social media, the scale of the thing blew up massive. That’s a major reason why we took off so quickly, perhaps in a way that no other band had ever done before (not necessarily in terms of scale but in terms of how it happened). Maybe we were the first band to benefit from the full power of that new platform? I don’t know, I could be reading too much into it. What I do know is that once our fans got onto social media, things were never the same again.