One Direction will not be touring for the foreseeable future. After years of manic schedules of world tours, promo days, events, gigs, interviews, fan-stalkery, partying, private jets and snatches of sleep whenever and wherever possible, they will, by next January, be on hiatus.
To make the split – sorry, hiatus – look like a necessary evil, instead of the inevitable end to a product that’s been exhausted beyond its sell-by date (the average boy band lasts 6.8 years, but these include bands who never had the pressures of social media making them traceable nearly everywhere), highly publicised stories of Liam and Louis not being able to quite handle the fame have circulated.
First of all, there’s Liam having a panic attack before going on stage, which led to a cancelled tour date, then there’s Louis getting chucked out of a hotel in Newcastle for trashing the room. As we saw when Zayn Malik quit the band in March of this year, stories of the band's personal upset with the fame might serve to make any major departure or end of a band seem a little less horrible for the fans, who are more likely to feel sympathy for the boys' health than anger and entitlement after being abandoned by their idols.
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There’s another story doing the rounds to say the big reason the boys are going on hiatus is because of a three-album-long rift between Harry and Louis that has resulted in the pair barely speaking to one another and travelling the world separately in different planes (think of the carbon footprint on that!).
The source told The Sun: ‘Apart from Harry and Louis, no one knows exactly what caused the falling out — they didn’t even tell the other boys the full details. But it was very serious and their friendship has never recovered. Everyone involved in the band is well aware of the animosity between them.’
If there’s a feud between the pair, it wouldn’t be that ridiculous to suggest Harry has purposefully been fuelling Larry Stylinson in order to annoy Louis. After all, it'd be a very simple way to annoy someone who's disregarded Larry as: 'a fucking annoyance'.
It would be unfair to blame Harry trying to nause Louis up for One Direction’s entire demise – after all, despite being the most famous one with the most A-list prospects to follow, Harry has stuck around, working 17-hour days under pressure, jetlag and scrutiny alongside a bunch of guys who’ve all been expected to be best mates with each other from the get-go. But while One Direction were always going to come to an end, if Louis and Harry falling out has heralded the band’s demise, Larry Stylinson – regardless of its basis in truth – has been instrumental in killing off this world-famous, world-popular boyband. Though One Direction have amasses millions of fans and pounds between them and their record company, the fatal flaw this band of heroes have been handed by their A&Rs is a failure to see that young female fans will no longer take a backseat in their love stories, and have no desire to sit back and lazily gulp on the narrative fed to them.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.