Liam Payne said he felt “really good” when speaking to iFL TV, an online boxing platform, during the KSI vs. Joe Fournier fight on May 13. Liam, 29, was looking good and said that he was walking the straight and narrow when it came to drugs and alcohol. “I’m sober now [for] over 100 days. I feel amazing, I feel really, really good, and the support from the fans and everything has been really good, so I’m super happy.”
The update comes nearly two years after Liam went on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast and spoke about abusing pills and alcohol during his time in One Direction. “It was only until I saw myself after that I was like, ‘All right, I need to fix myself,'” he said, adding that he was about a month sober at the time. “It was like a few pictures of me on a boat, and I’m all, like, bloated out, and I call it pills-and-booze face….My face was just like ten times more than it is now. And I just didn’t like myself very much, so then I made a change.”
“The problem we had in the band,” he continued, “and I don’t blame anybody for this. I don’t want to seem like I’m whining or moaning, ‘Oh my god, look at my life’ whatever. But it feels to me like, when we were in the band, the best way to secure us, because of how big it got, was to just lock us in a room. And, of course, what is in the room? A minibar. So at a certain point, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to have a party for one,’ and that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life.”
In 2019, Liam spoke with The Guardian about his struggles with addiction. “It was so touch and go at every single show. I was slowly losing the plot,” he said. “Doing a show to however many thousands of people, then being stuck by yourself in a country where you can’t go out anywhere – what else are you going to do? The minibar is always there.”
Liam told The Guardian that he was taking an epilepsy drug as a mood stabilizer, which affected his cognitive functioning under certain lights. “I just needed a little bit of help to keep me stable,” he said, “but under certain lights on stage or during interviews, I wouldn’t be able to tell them my name.”
The singer also said that the pressure of being in the biggest band in the world was a lot to take. As the band got bigger and more popular, the fame was more sweltering. “I was like: ‘I don’t really know how to deal with this.’ Once you start, you can’t really press the stop button,” he said. After the band went on indefinite hiatus in 2016, he underwent therapy and started to prioritize his health and sobriety.