Niall Horan “didn’t leave a hotel once” during the five years he was in One Direction.
The What Makes You Beautiful hitmaker struggled with the intense fame that came with being in the biggest boy band on the planet from their inception on The X Factor in 2010, until they announced their indefinite hiatus in 2015.
Niall, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik – who had left the band months before they officially split – and the late Liam Payne couldn’t step outside without being mobbed by fans and paparazzi. Eventually, Niall had to isolate himself indoors.
The 32-year-old star insists his modest upbringing in Mullingar, Ireland, has stopped him from getting “too big for my boots”.
In conversation with former Manchester United aces Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes and comedian Paddy McGuinness on The Good, The Bad and The Football podcast, he recalled: “We definitely had good business management people, great management.
“I always felt like the Irish thing had something to play in terms of the way I was brought up, and I was never going to get too big for my boots anyway.”
He then quipped: “I’m sure I did in some shape or form.”
On the extreme measure he took to get some peace, Niall admitted: “I tried my best to try and keep things private outside of work because my whole life was very private and there were periods where I literally didn’t leave, I’d say for five years, didn’t leave a hotel once.”
Niall admitted there were times when they had to keep their egos in check, but they always had one another’s backs.
Asked if they ever “b******ed ” one another, he replied: “Yeah, there was a little bit of it. None of us were maniacs, but we definitely looked out for each other. That’s just the way it is. We had a good crew around us, we felt like we were in our bubble.
“Until we left the band, we never really knew how big it was, even though we were standing there on stage, looking out, we were just in this little bubble, and it was only afterwards looking back in.”
He recalled one occasion when he and his bandmates planned to visit a shopping mall in Peru, but they stayed back after police warned them that 10,000 fans had gathered outside their hotel.
He remembered: “We played in Uruguay the night before, we’d flown in after the gig into Lima, Peru, we passed this massive shopping centre, we were like ‘We’ll go there tomorrow.’
“Police had done a head count of 10,000 people on the street outside the hotel.”
As for being a solo artist, Niall admits he misses having his bandmates in the recording studio or onstage with him as it’s a lot of “pressure” on one person.