I’m not gonna claim this is all for me mum. But it was definitely….It was…

Somewhere en route, Tomlinson says, he found his feet as a performer. “In the last year of One Direction I was probably the most confident I ever was.

Tracks from Tomlinson’s solo record have been playing inside the studio. They’re modest, rather lovely pop songs that in their quiet way seem to acknowledge his underdog status.

Am I the only one who feels a little uneasy about him and Harry after that article? The way he sounded almost bitter that Harry gets all the good songwriters to work with him and how he was against the hiatus but others (I'm assuming Harry and Liam) weren't.

Sometimes my reservation, or my confidence, might have prevented me from doing something. And I’ve needed a mum in the past to kick me up the arse and go: ‘You’re doing it.’

“In the last year of One Direction I was probably the most confident I ever was. And then it was: ‘OK, hiatus!’” Tomlinson argued against it, he says, when the band first sat down to discuss separation. “It wasn’t necessarily a nice conversation. I could see where it was going.”

“You know I didn’t sing a single solo on the X Factor,” he says, recalling the time back in 2010, when One Direction were first put together as a band on the ITV reality show. “A lot of people can take the piss out of that. But when you actually think about how that feels, standing on stage every single week, thinking: ‘What have I really done to contribute here? Sing a lower harmony that you can’t really hear in the mix?” He guesses, smiling wryly, that in those months he was best known as “The kid wearing espadrilles, stood in’t back.”