Louis Tomlinson has opened up about Liam Payne’s tragic death in the wake of One Direction’s 15th anniversary.
He shared his feelings in a new interview
In a new Rolling Stone U.K. interview published on Tuesday, October 7, Tomlinson, 33, got candid about his grief, and how the 15th anniversary of One Direction’s formation went without Liam Payne as it was the first since his passing.
Tomlinson felt it was ‘uncomfortable’
“It was really uncomfortable,” Tomlinson said of the passing of the anniversary without Payne.
“Actually, the 15th anniversary, because the [collective] feeling to celebrate is as important, if not more important than ever, on behalf of Liam,” he told the outlet.
He used to feel ‘sick of nostalgia’
Tomlinson added that while he used to feel ‘sick of nostalgia’, the anniversary without Payne was different for him.
“You know, there’s still a level in my head [where it feels] unjust and frustrating that he’s not with us anymore,” he said.
Grieving is a difficult process for him
“So, it just brought up those feelings, although I’m still living with them anyway,” Tomlinson continued, before adding, “It was really, really, impossibly difficult for me to deal with losing Liam.”
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Tomlinson lost his mother, Johannah Deakin, to leukemia in 2016, and his younger sister, Félicité Tomlinson, in 2019 when she accidentally overdosed.
He thought he had learnt how to deal with it
“Naively, I thought that because at this point, I’m relatively well versed in grief for my age, that it might soften the blow. Super-naive. It’s very different. I’ve never lost a friend before,” Tomlinson said of his grief.
Tomlinson said he felt safe with Payne
The singer called Payne the ‘safest pair of hands’ in One Direction, saying of his guidance, “We were all just so amateur, but he was already where he needed to be by the time he did his first [X Factor] audition.”
The band members ‘looked up to him’
Tomlinson went on, “None of us would have admitted it at the time, because you have a lot of pride as a young lad, but we all looked up to him like that.”
Payne died after falling from a balcony at the CasaSur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina on October 16, 2024. He was 31 years old.
His cause of death was ‘polytrauma’
The BBC reported that an investigation into Payne’s death determined his cause of death was ‘polytrauma’, according to a hearing which took place in December at Buckinghamshire Coroner’s Court.
