The boys intend to bow out in rousing style
One Direction Apple Music Festival, The Roundhouse, NW1
One Direction are weary, and they can see a light at the end of the tunnel. The boyband have only to play a handful of dates of their aptly named On the Road Again world tour before they can start a “hiatus” that has been four years, four albums and dozens of marketing tie-ups in the making.
Before that, curiously, they had to play to their smallest crowd since 2011: 1,700 fans who won free tickets in a ballot. As longhaired heart-throb Harry Styles delighted in pointing out, there were men in the crowd, they had beards, and they were cheering.
Styles, alongside Niall Horan, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson, didn’t pretend to be overly excited: these were young men doing their day job of bashing out foot-stomping pop songs with all the ease that their sweet voices and effortless good looks allow.
They stood metres apart, united by matching sprayon black jeans. Zayn Malik’s headlinegrabbing departure from the band in March of this year hung heavily in the air. When Horan felt the heat and disappeared offstage to recover, they joked: “We’ve lost another one! They’re dropping like flies!”
This one-off set was a boiled-down version of their juggernaut stadium show. No fireworks, but a smattering of 15 hits: from their debut as a post X Factor band, What
Makes You Beautiful, to their first as a foursome, Drag Me Down. It showed how they have transformed from keen, clean teens to tattooed men who have already outgrown some of their songs.
Little Things, an endearing ballad from their third album, which hints at sexual maturity, is a good example. Payne ably took on Malik’s soprano parts, but the band were restless, and the crowd with them. While Louis and Liam dueted during
Night Changes, Styles played the fool with his fans. One Direction appeared a band more weathered than their years. There was even an undercurrent of brotherly bickering reminiscent of that between Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of Horan’s beloved The Who.
Payne admitted that he had “never been so nervous” than before this Roundhouse show, after years of being placed on an arena-sized pedestal. But the smaller space brought with it an honesty that allowed the group’s boy-next-door personalities to shine through. Styles’s dry wit was especially charming – he rattled off a list of the band’s more ludicrous merchandise: “We’ve got bedsheets, we’ve got masking tape…” Horan, making a brief appearance on lead guitar, looked comfortable jamming with the backing band.
The night ignited with a rousing Story of My Life and Midnight Memories, with Tomlinson’s voice climbing the scales before an emphatic chorus. The group’s signature sign-off, Best Song Ever, was wonderful, contagious and silly. We may never see One Direction sounding quite like this again.