.

Louis talking about the Netflix documentary with Zayn and who was the driver [BBC Radio Live Lounge, 29.10.25].

Then we had a meeting one day and it did. [Interview: What happened in that meeting? Was is it Simon saying something? Is it the boys? Is it representatives?] It was us boys, which was great. Always how it should be, like that, obviously, but I think... it almost might as well have been representatives. What's really fascinating is those real serious moments, we wouldn't have a lot of them in One Direction, we were just going with the flow and really happy, you know, for each other and stuff like that. But I think those kind of moments where you have to be selfish, it was an atmosphere that I never really felt in the band, because normally, like I said, we're arm-in-arm, arm-in-arm, so it's all this camaraderie, and then all of a sudden you get someone thinking more independently and more for themselves, which, by the way, they have every right to do, of course. But it just felt, the room felt… cold that day, I can remember that, in particular. There was… it was… I'm trying to find the right metaphor for it. It was something where— these are all the same faces that I've seen every single day, but I've never quite felt an energy like that in the room. There was like a, there was this emptiness. And I think probably because we knew, we all knew collectively where it was going, you know, and that's probably some friction between those ideas. The thing that really bothered me was, and this again is naive— I was so naive at the time— but I was adamant on having some kind of indication of, because it was, it was, it was originally said as— what's that fucking word we've used a million times— 'HIATUS.’ By the way, it's just such a cringey word. So it was originally pitched as that. So I was thinking, I remember saying like, 'Well, if I'm going to try and do some stuff on my own', and at this point I didn't even know what I was going to do, I was like, it'd be good to know how long this break's going to be for. So let's speculate, a year, two years, five years, 10 years, 15 years? I never really got an answer to that question, which I understand now, because truthfully, I don't think the people— or the person involved— was brave enough to answer that question deep down. I think they probably knew the reality, and that's why it was tough.

At this point we need to remember a few things:

no one, more than his friends and family, has the right to talk about Liam, especially if this is made to honor him;

we will never know what Liam would have wanted after his death (people remembering and talking about him or not);

everyone has its way to handle grief.

I am not against people who speak publicly about their pain and their grief because we live in a world where there are externalizing people and internalizing people; there are people who need to talk "loudly" about what they are going through and there are people who prefer to process everything "silently". And both these ways are totally right. If someone speaks publicly about pain, it's not an attention seeker automatically; if someone chooses to stay silent, it's not a careless person. IMO what makes the difference is the purpose you want to gain and the way you talk about someone. Louis didn't make his grief for Liam a trait of his personality. He talked briefly about one of his best friends. Nothing of what he said seems exagerated or fake or made-up or pathetic. Tbh he was very respectful.