Liam Payne claims One Direction almost killed him

Liam Payne has taken yet another hard swipe at his former band. The singer has revealed that staying in the now-disbanded One Direction “would have killed” him.

In an interview on the podcast Table Manners with Jessie Ware, Payne got candid once again about what he truly felt of the band calling it quits. The singer even recalled times during the height of One Direction’s fame that he describes as “mega stressful.”

“It was really scary at first,” Payne when asked what he felt about the band’s split. “But I needed to stop, definitely. It would have killed me. One hundred percent.” Once upon a time, One Direction became a massive phenomenon that took over the world. Payne had performed with former bandmates Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, and Louis Tomlinson.

Payne claims that the peak of the British boyband’s popularity was too much to handle for him. He shared that being in the band meant he “was going through this really crazy circumstance that you just completely lost control of.”

“There’s no stop button. You’ve got no control over your life. That’s why I lost complete control of everything,” he shared about the experience. “… We were definitely overworked… I had no personal life. I learned nothing about myself.”

Payne even admitted that the stress had let him to seek psychiatric help. “I remember getting to therapy the one time and the guy was like, ‘What do you like to do?’ [And I said,] ‘I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue.'”