Be Sure To Vote For One Direction At The 2014 World Music Awards. They Are Nominated In The Following

Geoff, Julian, and other friends & family dancing to Act My Age and the boys singing back to them - OTRA Sheffield 31.10.15

One Direction review – a demob-happy romp through the hits

 Apple festival, Roundhouse, London One Direction come across as refreshingly human in a fun, intimate gig on what might prove to be the band’s final tour

“Oh no. We’ve lost another one,” notes Liam Payne, halfway through One Direction’s intimate Apple festival gig – a 1,700-capacity show that is, in all likelihood, the last opportunity their fans will have to see the whites of 1D’s eyes for some time.

Towards the end of lovey-dovey power ballad 18, Niall Horan disappears offstage, limping a little on his black cast, the result of a recent mysteriously fractured foot. No one really notices for a while – Harry Styles has just straddled a microphone stand in a suggestive manner. But Horan does not return for what seems an eternity. This gig is being streamed live and he is clearly not just strapping on a guitar behind a speaker. “They’re dropping like flies!” quips Payne as the band play for time. “We’re turning into Take That!”

Gigs by such slick juggernauts as One Direction (and Apple) don’t usually go far off-piste. Tonight’s one-hour show is meant to be about thanking Apple profusely and emptying bottles of water over the crowd, which is harder to do in arenas. Instead, Horan’s funny turn – the heat, he says, on his recovery one song later – is just one of a series of little glitches that turn this 15-track set by a phenomenally successful vocal group into something a little more intriguing: a demob-happy romp through the hits in which the facade of drilled homogeneity begins to slip.

Although they would argue it is merely the end of the beginning, we are now witnessing the beginning of the end for One Direction, the record-breaking boy band de nos jours. Earlier this year, 1D shed the brooding Zayn Malik. He gave up singing the high notes to make “real music”, a strategy that landed him in an ugly spat with erstwhile producer Naughty Boy, who has since consoled himself byworking with Beyoncé.

They’re dropping like flies! quips Payne as the band play for time. We’re turning into Take That!

More recently, the rump 1D announced a hiatus, assuring fans that 2016 would be a mere gap year, rather than the end of days. The day of this Apple assignation, One Direction released details of their forthcoming fifth album, Made in the AM, due in November (on the same day as a Justin Bieber album, allegedly). You could read it as meaning “recorded in the wee hours”; fans immediately decided AM meant “after Malik”. Tonight, 1D play MITAM’s persuasive lead single Drag Me Down, whose dramatic pre-chorus-to-chorus drop faintly echoes I Knew You Were Trouble by Taylor Swift. (Mercifully, there’s no whisper of Infinity, the dull ballad that accompanied the album announcement.)

So, business as usual, it seemed – until this strangely humanising set. Payne, the chattiest Direction, loses his microphone stand, meandering around during Little Things until Styles finds it for him. Styles, meanwhile, checks up on his sister, who is here on a date, and sings an impromptu Happy Birthday to a girl called Chloe. He jokes that it will be available priced 59p.

If One Direction are marking time – the last official date of their arena tour is Sheffield on 31 October – they are marking it with a mixture of commitment and insouciance. Styles, in particular, invests every line with passion, as evinced by his screwed-up emoting face. With his mane of luxuriant hair, a pink polka-dot shirt unbuttoned to the waist, he pulls mic-stand jinks and rockular poses on Midnight Memories and Story of My Life, suggesting a Romantic poet as imagined by a Japanese schoolgirl, or an anime Robert Plant. He points out men in the audience, singling out those with hipster beards. “He drives an old-school bicycle to work!”

By contrast, Louis Tomlinson, the football-playing cipher, smiles enigmatically and sticks tight to his mic stand, as though it might get away. Fireproof, the pleasantly mellow, West Coast-y, Fleetwood Mac-ish tune from 1D’s 2014 album, Four, features one of his more dulcet verses. The night’s unexpected star, though, is Liam Payne, who plays his microphone like a guitar, dances like he means it, and glues the team together. During What Makes You Beautiful, as the crowd take over the singing of their most-loved hit, the four enjoy a little pally moment centre stage: gearing up for one more push before each tests their mettle solo. Reduced, perhaps, but not diminished.

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