‘We joke about it [Zayn’s vanity] – we’ll say, “Zayn, quick, look, there’s a mirror over there you’ve missed”’
Is there a member of One Direction for everyone?
Is Niall, for example, the baby of the band and Harry the lothario?
‘What’s a lothario?’ asks Louis. ‘A
womaniser,’ replies Zayn, who once had ambitions to become an English
teacher. He pauses for a moment: ‘I think he was a character in a play
by Shakespeare or, no wait, maybe he was from something such as Don
Quixote.’ When I check later, ashamed of my own lack of knowledge, I
discover Zayn is right, but his impressive response is quickly dismissed
by the others who are eager to confirm that – never mind Harry’s status
as a womaniser – Niall is indeed the baby.
‘There
is no doubt Niall is the cute one,’ says Louis. ‘I feel really
protective towards Niall,’ adds Liam. ‘Yeah, in the nicest possible way I
would much rather see any of us punched than Niall,’ says Louis. ‘If
you saw someone go to punch Niall you would just go psycho…’ continues
Harry. ‘I’d kill him,’ Liam states unequivocally.
‘I
don’t know what it is, but even though he isn’t the youngest, he’s the
one we feel almost maternal towards,’ Zayn says. When I agree that, as a
mother of a boy about their age, he makes me feel maternal too, there
is a brief silence before Harry says, ‘You can take him home if you
want,’ prompting a burst of laughter from everyone but Niall.
Unlike
most boys their age, the band live in their own flats in the same
London block, though Harry – who shared his with Louis – has recently
bought a house in North London, and Zayn in Hertfordshire. But their
‘tour bus’, they say, is as ‘disgusting’ as a student residence.
‘When we first got together we went to
Wembley to see Take That and we thought, “Yeah that’s what we want to be
doing.” Fifteen years from now we want One Direction to be playing a
gig together at Wembley'
‘In some ways we are like
students in the way we live,’ replies Liam, ‘except that we work harder.
Whenever I ring any of my mates at uni – around two in the afternoon
because they never wake up before then – and ask what they are doing
they usually say “just hanging in halls playing Fifa”.’
The band do play the console game Fifa – Louis and Harry are ‘the dream team’ – and they love typically student television (‘Family Guy, American Dad!, stuff that makes us laugh, and mindless TV like Jeremy Kyle, Banged Up Abroad and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents’),
but they are anxious to stress that there is little time for anything
but grafting. ‘I think of it like this: there are a lot of people who
get paid a lot for doing not much at all – you know, like socialites who
get paid for appearing in reality shows or people who earn like a
million pounds a day working a couple of hours buying and selling shares
– but what we earn we earn for doing an awful lot. We are constantly
working,’ says Liam.
