“He came around to my hotel room, we had a coffee, and then he came to the gig that night.” Weeks later, Liam Payne was dead at 31. Now Niall is talking about what he remembers and what still makes him laugh.
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Niall Horan is now speaking about the loss of his former One Direction bandmate Liam Payne. In a recent interview with The Times of London, the Irish singer reflected on Payne’s death and their last meeting,
Liam Payne died on October 16, 2024. He was 31. Payne fell from the third-floor balcony of the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Emergency services had been called to the hotel shortly before the incident after staff reported a guest acting erratically and destroying property in his room. Payne was pronounced dead at the scene after suffering catastrophic injuries. His family released a statement saying they were “heartbroken” and asked for privacy during their grief.
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Payne rose to global fame as a member of One Direction, one of the best-selling boy bands of all time. The group formed on The X Factor in 2010 and went on hiatus in 2016. Alongside Horan, the band included Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik.
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Horan’s tour, The Show Live on Tour, had stopped in Argentina in early October 2024, just weeks before Payne’s death. Payne, who was in Buenos Aires for a routine visa renewal, met up with Horan during that trip.
“We met up, had a chat, he came around to my hotel room in the daytime and we had a coffee, and then he came to the gig that night,” Horan recalled on The Tommy Tiernan Show in April 2026. “He was in the dressing room before, and came to the show.”
Horan described Payne as being on “good form” during that visit. He said he was glad that his last memory of Payne was a happy one. “I’m glad of that, it means my last memory of him was happy,” Horan told The Times of London.
When news of Payne’s death reached Horan, his first reaction was complete disbelief. He was at home when a notification appeared on his phone before bed. “I just remember getting a message,” he told GQ Hype in March 2026. “And I was just like, What?… I just didn’t think it was real.”
Horan described the initial days as a cycle of heavy emotions. “I just went back from shock to sadness to anger,” he said. He noted that it felt impossible to accept the death of someone he had just seen, someone so young. “Someone so young, you’re not expecting to hear that they’ve passed, especially someone that you’ve just seen,” he added.
After learning of the death, Horan said he “went into hiding a little bit.” He stepped away from public life while he processed what had happened.
Horan spoke about the depth of his friendship with Payne. He described it as a bond that did not require constant contact to remain strong. “Our friendship was a bond that was there forever even if we hadn’t seen each other for a while,” Horan said, “and it’s wild that one day, like the flick of a switch, he’s gone.”
He recalled specific memories that stood out. The two had shared a room during the bootcamp stage of The X Factor before the group was formed. “I just got to know him a little bit and then we ended up doing what we did together,” Horan said. He talked about random nights playing FIFA on the tour bus, racing around stadiums on Segways, trips to the beach in Australia, and the time Payne’s swimwear went missing at the beach.
He pointed to the private nature of those memories as something irreplaceable. “Memories that only he and I can share, ’cause you have a team and you have people around all the time, but we always said that only us have that experience, no one else has that,” Horan said.
In his Times of London interview, Horan described how grief has taken on a layered quality over time. “It still feels surreal,” he said. He noted that thinking about Payne does not only bring pain. “When I think of Liam’s passing, there is sadness, but it also makes me laugh and smirk because of the memories we had,” Horan said.
He gave a specific example involving their time in Australia. “I’ll go to places and think of something stupid in a hotel or something random that makes me laugh. We always had good fun in Australia because we were able to get out and go to the beach. Liam wasn’t too bad at surfing. I can barely swim.”
He described this grief as having “light and shade.” He also confirmed that the families of all the One Direction members have stayed in touch since Payne’s death to support one another through the loss.
Horan channeled his grief into his fourth studio album, Dinner Party, set to release on June 5, 2026, through Capitol Records. The closing track on the album, “End of an Era,” is a direct tribute to Payne.
The song was originally written with collaborators John Ryan and Julian Bunetta, both of whom had known Payne since the One Direction years. The track had been written multiple times before Payne’s death, initially as a reflection on leaving the past behind while looking forward. After Payne died, the song took on an entirely different meaning.
“Me and John had this song called ‘End of an Era,'” Horan explained on the And the Writer Is podcast. “I was just singing all these melodies and had this idea for a song that was leaving your past behind, but kind of with nostalgia while being excited for the future.” After Payne’s passing, Horan said the track became far more personal.
Horan told Rolling Stone that all of his memories from the One Direction years remain positive. “At the end of the day, all of my memories are happy. We were talking about it when we were writing it. All of our memories are traveling the world, messing around, having fun, and being teenagers. I don’t have negative memories,” he said.
When asked how he thought Payne would have reacted to the song, Horan said simply, “I think it’s his type of song, he liked Coldplay, he loved songs like ‘You & I’ by One Direction, songs that went somewhere.”
The four surviving members of One Direction, Horan, Styles, Tomlinson, and Malik, reunited publicly at Payne’s funeral in 2024. That occasion reportedly brought them closer and contributed to renewed creative energy across the group’s solo careers.
Horan paid tribute to Payne on Instagram shortly after his death in October 2024, posting a photo of the two together and writing: “Liam had an energy for life and a passion for work that was infectious. He was the brightest in every room and always made everyone feel happy and secure.”
He added at the time: “The bond and friendship we had doesn’t happen often in a lifetime.”
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