One Direction closer than ever and sharing beers says Louis Tomlinson

Surviving member of One Direction are closer than they’ve been for years says Louis Tomlinson who enjoys sharing a beer with his bandmates. Admits while he knew Harry Styles and Niall Horan would succeed solo, he was less confident about his own chances at a solo career ahead of third LP. He also spills on the 1D songs he’ll be playing live solo and the boyband rivals that keep him up at night.

One Direction are closer than they’ve been for years and enjoy “a beer” together says Louis Tomlinson. It’s a whole decade since the band went on hiatus and all five members went on to enjoy solo success. However, Louis admits in Billboard that their advancing years, plus the tragedy of losing Liam Payne, has brought them back together more often.

Louis, who returns with new solo LP, How Did I Get Here? on January 23: “Naturally, there is a closeness — it definitely feels closer than it was. But I think we’re all so busy, it’s hard to keep that consistency. It also depends person to person. Like, Niall — and hopefully he’d say the same about me — we could not exchange a text in a whole year and then go for a beer and literally be chatting nonstop.”

That closeness will be seen in a new Netflix docuseries, capturing Louis and Zayn Malik’s shared adventure across the United States last year, although Tomlinson is keeping mum on details: “It was his idea, actually — I’ll give him credit for that brilliance”

Being in the world’s biggest boyband was like riding rollercoaster for Louis: “Those first two years [we] were just holding on for dear life — and not in a bad way, [but] in an utterly exciting way. Things were changing so fast, but you have to remember that none of us have ever had any experience of what it was supposed to be like to be in a boy band, to be a recording artist, to be a touring artist.”

Louis always knew his One Direction bandmates would make a success of going solo, well some of them at least. “There might be one or two people from a band that prosper, but history says there’s not normally more than two,” he spilled. “I always knew Harry was going to go on to do what he’s done — I’m sure he’s superseded his own expectations in the way that he’s taken over the world, but we knew he’s got everything it takes to be a great artist. And Niall, I had a good feeling about too — he’s Irish, he’s lovely, everyone loves him.”

However, Louis was not so confident about his own chances of carving out a solo career for himself: “I was never thinking, ‘I’ll be in that group [of One Direction alumni] that succeeds’.”

The Doncaster star embarks on a huge arena tour this year and he’s currently deciding which One Direction classics to crack out having previously done Drag Me Down, Little Black Dress and No Control.

“For starters, I like to pick one that I wrote — but the biggest challenge is finding a lyric that feels all right to sing as a 34-year-old guy,” he admitted. “And that’s actually not the easiest thing to do, because some of those One Direction lyrics are f**king raunchy, man, proper!

“But it’s also a really fun thing to try and integrate something sonically. We do a version of Night Changes that’s got some real tempo behind it — Sam Fender was an inspiration for that composition of it. That’s a full-circle feeling of a song that I sang in the band, and now I’ve found a way for it to fit in [my] set.

“I put off singing No Control forever. There was something kind of beautiful about the fact that everyone was always asking for it, and I never did it. But I did buckle during my Away From Home festival, and actually, I really enjoyed it.

“I’ve not sang that song for a long time, and that song was a big moment for me in the band, actually. I think I introduced it by saying something along the lines of, ‘I’m never going to f**king do this again, so enjoy it!’ But [the fans] were singing really loud. I instantly felt good about doing it.”

Since One Direction have been away there’s been a lot of changes in the music industry, including the rise of AI music. Although Louis doesn’t fear for the future telling Billboard: “I think that there will be a shelf life for that kind of music and those kind of songs.

“There’s other music that serves a bit of a [different] purpose — if I was one of these streamers playing video games, and I wanted to play music on my stream, licensing is a nightmare with that, so you might just put on an AI playlist there, as just background music. I do think there will be use cases that aren’t really provocative.”

He’s more concerned with real life boybands stealing 1D’s thunder: “There was a time when BTS was on the way up, and I felt like, every time I logged into Twitter, they’d just taken one of our records for something — some fastest-selling thing, and they’d take it away! It was just a bit of a shame! But I don’t begrudge them that — that’s the nature of the music industry, it keeps moving.”

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