Why boybands rarely grow into good manbands
The news that One Direction is about to become Opposite Directions as the four remaining members take “an extended hiatus” for a year has provoked two types of reaction. In the under-16 fanbase, there is grief, despair, disbelief and even threats of self-harm. Tears shed by 10 million girls in the United Kingdom alone are believed to have altered precipitation levels, leading to torrential rain. Good news: if your house is flooded in the next 48 hours, you can sue 1D.
Among adults, there is shrugging indifference although, for many parents, there is also relief that they will no longer be sharing their daughter with a magnificent obsession. For my friend Kirsten, there is the hope that her 13-year-old’s bedroom will no longer be a creepy shrine to five young lads Sophie has never met. “At least teenage girls will now know what ‘hiatus’ means,” grumped one sceptic. He really doesn’t get it, does he?
For veteran boyband observers such as your columnist, the writing was on the wall five months ago when Zayn Malik announced he was leaving the group. Sure enough, Harry Styles, Liam Payne (the one who could sing), Louis Tomlinson and Niall Horan have decided to take a 12-month break to “pursue their own projects”. Ah, bless! Just about passable as a group, individually each member has about as much talent as a hibernating dormouse. It’s conceivable that Harry Styles’s sullen, low-cal Mick Jagger impersonation might give him a career for a while and the others could get lucky. After all, an inability to sing hasn’t got in the way of other teen phenomenons. Just look at Victoria Beckham.
However, talk that 1D will be back together in 2017 is piffle. Boybands are all about unrequited love, and a teenage girl’s heart has its seasons. The lads, who were younger than springtime when they finished third on The X Factor in 2010, are now old men of 21. The bloom of youth turns to bristle; Louis Tomlinson is about to become a father, for heaven’s sake, having casually impregnated a stylist, which rules him out for further use as an innocent love object.
So One Direction has come to a dead end, and there will be no U-turns, although, a decade from now, there will be a rather embarrassing comeback tour and one more lucrative trip down Memory Lane. But you can be sure another boyband will be along in a minute. Not just because the five boys made about £27 million each and generated up to £1 billion in revenue. But because little girls need a dress rehearsal for love.