Early this morning, it was confirmed by police in Argentina that the former One Direction member had died after falling from a balcony at his hotel on 16 October in the country’s capital, Buenos Aires.
In the hours following his death fans have begun to flood social media with heartfelt tributes to the 31-year-old, with clips from his first auditions on the ITV singing series also resurfacing online.
Liam Payne died after falling from a hotel balcony in Argentina ,aged 31 (Marc Piasecki/GC Images)
Payne was just 14 when he first appeared before judges Simon Cowell, Cheryl Tweedy (then Cole) and Louis Walsh, singing a rendition of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’.
He would make it through to the judges houses before being encouraged by Cowell to return in two years. He took the music mogul up on the advice and re-auditioned in 2010, going on to be placed into the group One Direction alongside Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik.
In the clip, an excited Liam tells the camera: “When I’m at school, in general, I think about singing all the time. I should really be concentrating on my school work but I just think about singing too much.”
He then heads into the audition and performs the Sinatra track, to which Cheryl told him: “I liked it. I think you’re really cute. I think you’ve got charisma.. you gave us that cheeky little wink.”
“I think this kid could do fantastic in the show,” Walsh added.
Cowell, on the other hand, wasn’t too convinced by the performance, saying: “I’m just missing a bit of grit, a bit of emotion and actually a bit of fun, funnily enough.”
He then told the teenager there’s ’20 percent missing’, to which Payne responded by asking the judges for another audition in order to show them that he had ‘that 20 percent’. The confidence was enough to get him through to the next round.
Further details have begun to emerge regarding the singer’s death, with Alberto Crescenti, the head of the state emergency medical system, releasing a statement which revealed Payne had fallen around 40 metres and suffered ‘severe injuries which were incompatible with life’.
“The alarm was raised at 5.04pm local time saying a person was lying in an internal patio at Casa Sur,” he said. “At 5.11pm an ambulance arrived and the man was certified dead.
“Afterwards we found out he had been a famous singer. Unfortunately the injuries he had suffered as a result of the fall proved to be fatal. There was no possibility of resuscitating him.”
