As One Direction fans mourn Liam Payne’s untimely passing, many north-east readers will be thinking back to the band’s appearances at the AECC in March 2011.
They were part of an X-Factor tour, and hadn’t yet reached the heights of stardom that lay ahead.
Other acts on the tour included Wagner, Rebecca Ferguson and Katie Waissel.
The young pop stars played covers including Kids in America, Chasing Cars, and Forever Young.
Liam Payne told press at the time he was a fan of skinny dipping
Liam Payne was 17 at the time, and confessed that the band was using their UK tour to go skinny-dipping, including in Aberdeen.
“It was freezing,” he said at the time.
He told reporters: “I’ve still got sand in my pockets. But the funniest thing was, Harry took off all his clothes but kept his shoes on.”
Harry Styles retorted that he didn’t want sandy toes, or to drag sand back into their digs.
At that time the band were starring in a Nintendo DS advert for Pokemon Black and Pokemon White, about to be revealed to the public.
The 1D boys had all auditioned for the X Factor separately, but were brought together in a stroke of genius by Simon Cowell and Nicole Scherzinger to form a five-piece boy band.
While they were in Aberdeen, it seems one lucky young fan named Harry got to meet members of the band.
The rest is history. Although they were eliminated in the final, their song Forever Young was leaked onto the internet, and Simon Cowell signed them to his own Syco Records for £2m.
Only three months before their Aberdeen appearance, the lads had been in LA, working on their debut album.
And six months after their Aberdeen gig, their debut single, What Makes You Beautiful was released, and in December they began their first UK tour, Up All Night, appearing in Glasgow but not Aberdeen.
Although the band went into a ‘hiatus’ in 2016, Liam was rarely far from the headlines at that time though his relationship with Girls Aloud singer Cheryl Cole, with whom he had a son in 2017.
With his co-stars Niall Horan, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik, Liam was an important part of one of the best-selling boy bands of all time, selling 70 million records world-wide.
Niall played P&J Live this September (2024), delighting the audience by singing a duet with local fan, Isla Macdonald.
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