Niall Horan recalls feeling like a "prisoner" during One Direction fame

Crazy fans Niall Horan recalls feeling like a "prisoner" during One Direction fame

Niall said the memories were “heartbreaking but amazing at the same time”

March 28 2021 05:59 PM

Niall Horan confessed that he felt like a “prisoner” at times during his One Direction days because of crazy fans.

The Mullingar native rose to fame after One Direction was formed on The X Factor in 2010 with bandmates Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik.

Looking back on the band’s monumental success over a decade later, Niall admitted that the madness and hysteria was difficult to cope with at the beginning.

Speaking on Dermot O’Leary’s People, Just People podcast, Niall said: “No one knew how big it was actually going to get... In the UK it was nuts. We’d go and do signings here and there and bits and pieces like that. It was crazy. That was the first kind of sight of it, banging on car windows. Around the release of What Makes You Beautiful is when it really kicked off.

“We were releasing What Makes You Beautiful and we were doing a HMV run around the country – Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester – to do the signings. That was the first time I saw the madness.”

When asked by Dermot if he sometimes felt a “prisoner” during his time in the band, Niall agreed and added: “We were 17, 18, 19 for the first few years and I struggled with it because I have to be doing something all the time and the thoughts of closing my curtains in my hotel room was madness to me.

“I struggled with the idea ‘Why won’t you just let us out? We just want to go for a walk.’”

Niall recalled instances of not being able to leave his hotel room while travelling the world and said the memories were “heartbreaking but amazing at the same time.”

The Nice to Meet You singer said: “I remember being in like in the stadium tour, the first time we ever went to South America we played stadiums straight away. It was nuts. Doing like Buenos Aires, Rio, Sao Paulo, Lima, Peru, Montevideo, Uruguay, all these amazing cities but not being able to see any of them.