she says he won't let her get a dog, which is fine, because they're in an apartment, and that's the kind of thing people say about their partners. he won't let me get a dog. and you're at a dinner party and you tilt your head a little to the side just like that dog he won't let her get, because is this the thing that's going to upset you? you don't know every corner of their relationship, she could be joking, they could have had so many healthy conversations about the dog, right, and maybe she's not letting herself get the dog because of money and time and whatever. but, like, she did say let
and she wants to move away from his hometown and he wants to stay and then he tells you with a wink and a conspiratorial stage whisper don't worry i'll convince her and she laughs about it - so clearly this is something they laugh about. but you do just stand there and stare at him like what the fuck, man. you can't say what you want to say which is why do you get the final say on everything because they're both obviously aware of the other person's stance on this and have obviously had private conversations about it and what are you going to do about it except make a scene and then he'll be mad at you and call you one of those bitches behind your back and she'll cut you off, which is a loss that doesn't feel worth it just because he makes you a little skeeved out every 3rd comment
and they both agree he just isn't the type to get flowers which is fine because everyone shows love differently, and are you really gonna judge someone based on their sense of individual relationship responsibility? maybe he's constantly cleaning her car and writing her poems and making her furniture or something. maybe she doesn't even like flowers and this is perfect, actually. and no you couldn't date him, obviously, ew; but like, she tells you she's happy. you almost send her a tiktok that says don't be 25 and the cool girl that doesn't need anything, you'll hate not getting flowers at 30, but that's like, starting drama & you shouldn't start drama needlessly.
and you're a little older than her but not so much older you can pull the whole trust me on this one babe thing and besides that wouldn't have worked anyway (when does it ever) and besides you have trauma so you and your therapist both agree that you're always looking for a problem even when there isn't one. and you tell yourself that just because you see them for 15 minutes every month does not mean you can identify every single red flag based on a single shitty half-joking(?) comment
and besides, what are you going to do? she says i actually wanted another stand mixer but thankfully he stops me when i'm about to spend too much money and you're standing there like are you okay? is this normal? is this just something people say? and again - what are you going to do?
to your therapist you try to language it - it's not, like, any of my business. but sometimes, doesn't it feel like - you should do something. there's got to be something, right? you've tried dropping little hints but they sail right through and you've tried having a single serious conversation and she got upset because why does it matter to you, yes it's different but we're happy, it doesn't need to make sense to you and you're like. really unwilling to push a boundary about it anymore; because the truth is that you know logically it shouldn't matter to you, as long as both parties are happy.
and besides, you've been wrong before. it's just... like, every time you see them both, something else happens, some kind of shiver down your spine like do you even hear each other when you talk. it's their strange, bickering orbit. just the way he's on his phone through dinner or watching sports instead of helping in the kitchen or, fuck, another one of these little throwaway comments he makes about we'll see about that, babe. she laughs when he calls her passions stupid shit and meanwhile she gets him tickets to see the knicks and he tells you well at least she's smart about something and still! it's none of your business.
you say get the dog anyway and she laughs. like, this is is you being funny. and not you saying - no really. get the dog. get the dog and get out of here. pack up and start running.
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Louis Tomlinson is sequestered in the executive boardroom of a swanky hotel in suburban London, and is treating it the way a pupil might a classroom when the teacher’s popped out. He’s leaning back on his chair, feet up on a radiator, hands clasped behind his head and a cigarette on the go. “All right?” he says, grinning impishly.
Despite huge global success with One Direction (70 million albums sold), which prompted a fanaticism that made Beatlemania look tame, he seems remarkably unaffected and far more normal than one might expect from someone with 35.8 million Twitter followers. He’s a 31-year-old so unassumingly bloke-next-door that the bloke next door wouldn’t look twice.
“I’ve always had a problem with ‘ego’,” he says, “and I’ve always been worried about being one of those people in the public eye who just loses all sense of reality, and becomes an arsehole.” As if by way of explanation, he adds: “I’m from Doncaster.”
And so while his former 1D bandmate Harry Styles, a superstar, floats through life like the fashion world’s favourite clothes horse, Tomlinson kits himself out in JD Sports: Kappa T-shirt, black sweatpants, Adidas socks, scuffed trainers. When he tells you he often frequents his local pub unmolested, you believe him.
“If someone does come up after an hour to ask for a selfie, I won’t say no and I won’t run away,” he says, “’specially if I’m three pints deep!”
Of the five members of 1D, Tomlinson has had the slowest start to a solo career. There are compelling reasons for this — family tragedy for one — but he’s also had to figure out who he is without the band around him. “With this job,” he says, “there’s so much room for overthinking, you know? Someone from the record label will tell you they like your stuff, but you find yourself thinking: yeah, but do they? It’s the fans that help you really believe in yourself.”
In the band, Zayn Malik had the best voice and Styles had the best everything else. While the other three — Tomlinson, Liam Payne and Niall Horan — were hardly driftwood, each has nevertheless had to dig deep to carve out a solo persona that would compel beyond the bubble.
“I do miss the boys,” he says, “and I do definitely miss being one of the five, but I like doing my own thing too. It was time.”
It’s a bright winter’s day, and the man in sports casual is enjoying special dispensation here in the hotel: permission to light up. Had this been denied, there might well have been a problem, for Tomlinson chain-smokes with the wild abandon of Mad Men’s Don Draper.
After the release of his second solo album, Faith in the Future, in November, he adds another necessary notch in the belt of any self-respecting pop star next month: the documentary. All of Those Voices is a routine behind-the-scenes look at 21st-century celebrity but stands out for the multiple crises of confidence Tomlinson feels any time he’s not on stage.
“This is a confidence game for anyone,” he says earnestly, “and there’s been plenty of moments of vulnerability throughout the entire process.” An overriding concern of the documentary is not just whether people would be interested in him, but whether they’d take him, someone discovered on a TV talent show, seriously.
When Styles won his Grammy awards this month — he collected two and won four Brits — he used his acceptance speech to say that “this doesn’t happen to people like me very often”. This was swiftly ridiculed across social media because of course white men tend to win quite a lot. But what he likely meant was that it doesn’t happen to the product of manufactured boy bands, many of whom have the use-by date of a pint of milk.
“Only Harry knows what he means there, it’s hard to speculate,” Tomlinson says, “but we all came from relatively humble beginnings, and now we are where we are.”
But while Styles is a once-in-a-generation talent and knows it, his erstwhile bandmates — and this one in particular — need convincing.
Louis Tomlinson comes from a big family — his mother, Johannah Deakin, married twice and had seven children — and was a hopeful child actor before in 2010 auditioning for The X Factor. This is where 1D were created, “masterminded” by Louis Walsh. Deakin, who had Tomlinson when she was 19, was his biggest fan and they’d always been close. When, for example, Tomlinson lost his virginity, it was she he told first, not his friends.
In 2016, a year after One Direction split, she died from leukaemia, aged 42. Two years later, his 18-year-old sister, Félicité, who’d been struggling to get over her mother’s death, accidentally overdosed on cocaine, painkillers and an anxiety drug. The combined loss hit him hard. Aside from the single he wrote about his mother’s passing, 2020’s Two of Us, his mourning has been largely private.
He squints through a veil of cigarette smoke. “Some of the things that have happened recently have been quite drastic, yeah, but then so much in my life seems to have been pretty extreme, one way or the other.” In 2016, at the age of 25, a brief relationship with a Californian stylist, Briana Jungwirth, resulted in a son. “There’ve been challenging times, definitely. It’s funny, but I couldn’t even tell you how many years ago my mum passed, I just blank it out. But for the first 18 months, I’d take any form of bad luck personally. I’d feel every tiny thing. But now I genuinely feel I’ve come out the other side. I feel more empathy for everything and everyone these days.”
After his 2020 debut album, Walls, failed to set the world alight, Tomlinson called time on his relationship with Simon Cowell. “It was mostly amicable,” he says, nodding. “Simon always had my best interests at heart, and I liked him. He had his faults of course, like all of us, but it was always inevitable I’d have to go off and do my own thing.”
His new record, then, was a leap into the unknown and he elected to write not with professional songwriters but rather fellow creative artists: Theo Hutchcraft from the band Hurts, Joe Cross from the Courteeners and the singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow. “And that was a big difference, huge. These are people who live and breathe music. It’s the first time I felt really comfortable doing my own stuff, you know?”
Previously he’d been encouraged to sing like a nice young pop star should, without regional inflection. “When I was in the band,” he says, “working with professional songwriters whose entire aim was to write the hit single, they’d tell me that singing in my natural accent wasn’t commercial. Sorry, but what a shit idea! Who wants to sound like everybody else? I dumbed down a little bit in the band, because you do, but I’ve learnt who I am now.”
The album, which has its inspiration firmly in early Noughties indie, sounds more Kaiser Chiefs than One Direction. A risk, then. But when it came out, it debuted at No 1. While this did wonders for his confidence, it’s clear from the documentary that he still needs people — a support group — around him. He actively courts the friendship of his touring band, not necessarily a given among solo pop stars, and he seems almost always sociable. It’s when he’s not up for group activity that people worry. There’s a revealing moment in the documentary of him having just appeared on James Corden’s US talk show. Backstage Corden, an old friend, pleads with him not to go quiet on him afterwards. “You vanish, you change your number, no one knows [where you are],” he says.
Until recently Tomlinson lived in London with his long-term girlfriend, the model Eleanor Calder, but recent reports suggest they’ve split up and he’s dating another model, Sofie Nyvang. Life, clearly, is complicated. Perhaps that’s why he smokes so much. He says, though, that he feels finally relieved of the myriad pressures that once clung to being a pop star whose fanbase was predominantly teenage. Such as?
“Well, being a role model for one. I never wanted that. I always had to worry whether it was OK if, say, I was seen here or if I could get away with smoking a joint there, before concluding: hmm, probably not. But I never wanted to be the perfect pop star, especially in the climate of Instagram. I don’t want to put an artificial world out there. I think it’s important that people see your scars, your flaws.”
It’s never easy growing up in public and Tomlinson had no choice. “When One Direction split up,” he says, “I was mortified, I was absolutely gutted. I was a bit bitter, I suppose because it just felt like another loss to me. But I’ve a better understanding of things now, and there’s not as much anger. It is what it is.
“Getting back together at some point is hard to imagine right now,” he continues, “but I’d be surprised if we lived out our lives and didn’t have a moment where we had a reunion, or whatever you want to call it. I’d be up for that.”
When I ask what it’s like watching Styles’s ascendance into the biggest star of his generation — something that might delay such a reunion — he blows out a long plume of smoke.
“Well, it’s not a surprise is it? We were always aware that Harry fit that mould, and it’s been an amazing thing to watch. Envy? At the start maybe, when I was trying to find my feet, but it’s never healthy to cross-reference your own success with others is it? These days I’m learning to elevate myself in those moments when I have to. I didn’t know how to do that before, but now? Now I know I f***ing can.”
All of Those Voices is in cinemas from March 22, allofthosevoices.com
-Full article. Feb 23 2023. Link here. Free link here.
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