Louis Tomlinson feels too old to sing some of One Direction’s songs.
The 34-year-old star shot to fame as a member of the What Makes you Beautiful group and though he visits their back catalogue for his live shows, he admitted it can be quite tough to choose which tracks to perform because some of them seems too “raunchy” now.
Asked if he has selected the One Direction songs he will play on his upcoming tour, he told Billboard: “For starters, I like to pick one that I wrote — but the biggest challenge is finding a lyric that feels all right to sing as a 34-year-old guy.
“And that’s actually not the easiest thing to do, because some of those One Direction lyrics are f****** raunchy, man, proper!
“But it’s also a really fun thing to try and integrate something sonically.
“We do a version of ‘Night Changes’ that’s got some real tempo behind it — Sam Fender was an inspiration for that composition of it. That’s a full-circle feeling of a song that I sang in the band, and now I’ve found a way for it to fit in [my] set.”
While it has been nearly 10 years since One Direction went their separate ways, Louis doesn’t think there have been any bands like them since then.
He said: “There was a time when BTS was on the way up, and I felt like, every time I logged into Twitter, they’d just taken one of our records for something — some fastest-selling thing, and they’d take it away! It was just a bit of a shame!
“But I don’t begrudge them that — that’s the nature of the music industry, it keeps moving.
“But I still don’t think there’s been anything similar, really, to One Direction.
“I’m sure people are trying, but I think what was really interesting about One Direction [was] pretty much every boy band that had come before us would fit into a quite specific mould.
“There was a way of doing boy bands back in the day — dressing in the same outfits, dancing. We broke free from that mould.”