Was One Direction a straight-edge band? It was for Harry Styles – sorta. The 25-year-old singer revealed that while he was in the group, he held off on experimenting with drugs. “When I was in the band, it was like, to me it felt like it was so much bigger than any of us that I kind of felt like, ‘I’m not going to be the one who f-ck it up,’” he said on Nov. 22 edition of Apple Music’s New Music Daily with Zane Lowe. “So I was like, ‘now is the time in my life when you probably go out and experiment and do this and you take this, and you do that, and that’s what you do with your friends.’ And I was like, I’m not going to be the guy who messes it up. So I was like, ‘I’m not going to do any of that stuff.’”
However, that was then, and this is now. Harry told Rolling Stone that while recording his upcoming sophomore solo release, Fine Line, in Malibu, he bit off the top of his tongue after doing magic mushrooms. “Making this record felt like—I just felt, so much, like, so much more joyous,” Harry told Zane Lowe. “And I was with my friends, and we were in Malibu…I felt so safe. It was like, ‘I want to take some mushrooms? I’m going to take some—like now is the time to have fun. Like, we’re in Malibu, 24. I’m also in music.”
This isn’t the first time that Harry has brought up his sobriety in One Direction. “On the first couple of tours, it was so exciting as we’d have a drink and go to parties,” he told The Sun in 2017. “But for me, the albums got higher, so they become harder to sing, so I knew if I didn’t come off stage and go to bed, I wouldn’t be able to sing the next night. Also, it’s just not for me. I’d rather wake up with a clear head. I’m not straight edge or anything – I’ll celebrate and hang out with friends when it’s the right time. But I like knowing I’m not going to be stressing about having to do something the next day.”
Harry’s sobriety paid off. In fact, the only major drug scandal to hit One Direction came in 2014, and it involved Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson. In a video that appears to show the two smoking “illegal substances,” Louis and Zayn joke about smoking a “joke” while they traveled through Peru. Liam Payne alluded to the scandal in a tweet. “I love my boys, and maybe things have gone a little sideways. I apologize for that. We are only in our 20’s we all do stupid things at this age.”