Zayn Malik has broken his silence on his split with One Direction – eight years after the fact. The former boy bander joined host Alex Cooper on her viral podcast, Call Her Daddy, to talk about his decision to leave the uber-successful group.
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Halfway through the interview, Cooper brought up Malik’s decision to leave the band, which consequently, “Shook the fucking world.” She then asked the singer to take the listener back to the moment when he finally made the decision to leave.
“I’d known for a minute,” Malik explained. “I don’t want to go into too much detail, but there was a lot of politics going on. Certain people were doing certain things and certain people didn’t want to sign contracts. So I knew something was happening.”
“So I just got ahead of the curve,” he continued. “I thought ‘I’m just gonna get out because I think this is done.’ I, completely selfishly, wanted to be the first person to go and make my own record. I’m a passive dude, but when it comes to my music, I’m competitive.”
Malik went on to talk about “borderline issues” within the band members’ friendships with one another.
“We’d been together every day for five years,” he said. “We got sick of each other. We were close. We’d done crazy things with each other that no one else in the world would ever understand. I look back on it now in a much fonder light than I would’ve as I’d just left.”
As One Direction’s break-up grows smaller and smaller in the rearview, the members are opening up about their experiences in the group. Liam Payne gave a similarly candid interview about his qualms with the group on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast.
Payne recently apologized for those comments, saying he was struggling with addiction at the time he made them.
“My own frustrations with my own career and where I kind of landed, I took shots at everybody else which is wrong,” he explained in a video posted to his Youtube channel. “Obviously, I want to apologize for that, in the first instance, because that’s definitely not me.”
“One of the biggest remarks I made was about the One Direction thing … and a lot of self-protection, I suppose, in that moment, more than anything,” Payne continued. “The rest of the boys really stuck by me when I needed them most, they kinda came to the rescue. Even Zayn, as well, which is why I did send him a little thank you online. It came across really big-headed didn’t it?”
Now that the band members are talking about the group more and more, fans are starting to speculate that a reunion might be on the horizon. The band has neither confirmed nor denied that possibility.
Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
