One Direction’s Week in Review: 9/12
The band is on a break, but the boys aren’t.
One Direction last performed together on a Sunday night, Dec. 13th, 2015, on the season finale of the British iteration of “The X Factor.” They sang a single from their fifth album, accepted accolades from Simon Cowell and others, and then vanished into the night to begin a hiatus with no end-date. Between them, in the months since they last took the stage, they have officially announced very little — a solo record deal, the birth of a child, the founding of a golf management company. But each week they are out in the world, doing things, going places. This is what we know.
September 17th: Niall and friends at his party
— @NJHNEWS
Niall Horan turned 23 on Tuesday. He celebrated with a dinner in LA with various Irish people and several known associates of Patrick Schwarzenegger, the son of the former governor. No members of One Direction appeared to be in attendance. On Friday, he joined many of the same crew for a wine tasting at Malibu Wine Safari, a vineyard that is also a zoo. On Saturday, he had a birthday party (with his friend and possible cousin Martin Devine) that featured a cake shaped like a woman’s headless torso in American flag bikini-on it (“Happy Birthday Niall & Martin”) and a Donald Trump piñata (Horan has a statue of Barack Obama in his garden in London). On Sunday he attended another party; he wore no shirt.
Liam Payne jumped into a pool and questioned the accuracy of the word “football” as used by Americans. On Thursday, he shared that he was “hard at work” in the studio, presumably on his solo album. Payne’s deal with Capitol UK is the only confirmed solo record deal from any member of the band, though Niall Horan and Harry Styles have both been rumored to have signed solo contracts, Horan with Universal and Styles with Columbia. “One Direction will always be my home and family but I’m very excited to see what this chapter brings,” Payne wrote in July after sharing the news.
Louis Tomlinson, with longtime companion Oli Wright, picked up his 8-month-old son Freddie in a Starbucks parking lot in Malibu on Saturday. While he waited for the child to be dropped off, he smoked, met a fan, and took a selfie.
Harry Styles’s whereabouts are unknown. He was last seen Sunday Sept. 4 at a party in LA.
Notable Adjacent News
Zayn Malik, former member of the band, is publishing a book — “a photographic journey of his life” — with Penguin Random House, to be released Nov. 1. “I’m going to show you as much as I can so that you can judge me on my own terms, not on what the press or anyone else says,” writes Malik in the book’s opening, according to a release. On Tuesday’s red carpet event for America’s Got Talent, a reporter asked Simon Cowell about the book’s possible disclosures. “You know what?” Cowell replied. “I genuinely don’t care.”