Liam Payne remembered his years in One Direction as the best time of his life, according to the members of Soulidified who knew him as a mentor. Bradley Rittmann and Shade Jenifer recalled the singer’s advice in a radio interview. He urged them to talk through disagreements and reminded them, after a disappointing competition, that One Direction had finished third on “The X Factor.”
When Soulidified came away from a music competition disappointed, Liam Payne had an example ready. The band that made him famous had finished third on “The X Factor.” He knew the feeling of coming up short in front of cameras. He also knew how little that result could tell a group about what would happen once it began to make records and find an audience of its own.
Bradley Rittmann and Shade Jenifer told that story in an interview with Jordan North, Chris Stark and Sian Welby on “Capital Breakfast.” They had come to talk about their own music. In describing the time they spent with Payne, they explained how often the problems facing a young band prompted him to return to something he had learned with One Direction.
Jenifer remembered Liam Payne calling the years with the other four singers the best of his life. It was a private recollection passed on by someone who heard him speak about those years. The detail Jenifer took away was how much Payne valued the company. Even with the rest of his career to look back on, the experience of being in the group still had a particular weight for him.
The advice that accompanied that memory was practical. Talk to one another when something goes wrong. A disagreement gets harder to resolve when everyone has heard a different version through somebody outside the group. For a young act, small choices over rehearsals, songs or the way a performance went can involve every member. Learning to have an awkward conversation early gives the band a better chance of getting back to the music.
Liam Payne knew how suddenly that kind of collective life could begin. In 2010, he, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik became One Direction on British television. They arrived as individual contestants and left the series with a new group to work in. Coming third gave them a result to live with. The next decisions were about how to make a band beyond the programme that had brought them together.
Within the following five years, One Direction released five studio albums. “What Makes You Beautiful,” “Story of My Life” and “Night Changes” came from different points in that run. For listeners, the records give the period a soundtrack. Jenifer’s account supplies something the singles cannot convey on their own: how a singer remembered the daily experience of standing beside the other people who made them.
After the group’s shared activity wound down, Liam Payne recorded and performed under his own name. That experience was part of what he brought to the conversations with Soulidified. He told them that each could do well individually and that the experience they were having together would be difficult to recreate. There would be time to think about separate careers. The friendship involved in making this one work needed attention while they were all still in it.
For Rittmann, time spent with Liam Payne remained a source of gratitude and motivation. Jenifer focused on how the advice had affected the way the members communicate. The pair spoke about things they could use in the room with each other. Their account makes the mentorship sound like an ongoing conversation about everyday decisions, the kind a group has to make in between the moments the public sees.
Liam Payne died on October 16, 2024, aged 31. The interview appeared shortly after the second anniversary of his death. Hearing the band tell the story now gives the memory a different weight. The words Jenifer describes belong to the earlier period when Payne was spending time with Soulidified and could use one of his own memories to help them through a disappointment.
There is a reason the competition story sticks. It is easy to read the history of One Direction backwards from the sold-out rooms and records that followed. In the moment Payne drew on, five contestants were standing at the end of a television series with two acts ahead of them. There was work to do, and their experience of doing it together was still in front of them.
Soulidified were trying to see past a result that had just gone against them. Payne had been on the same side of a scoreboard. He offered them the actual place his group had come, a number small and specific enough to remember. Third was where the programme had left One Direction. For the five singers, it was also the point from which they went to work.
