Louis Tomlinson

It was kind of my role in the band, I think, to kind of do that.

And I realised that by far I was the most opinionated in the band, definitely.

So I think I wanted to use that for good and not just chatting shit about someone on Twitter or something.

Another important distinction about One Direction is...

This is not disrespectful to Ed.

I appreciate I was in a boy band.

I know that, right?

But if there would be one genre of music that I would think might be the most naff, it's boy band, if you could call that a genre.

So at this point, going into One Direction when I was 18, growing up in the north of England, it's like real...

It's kind of like snobby musically, you know, there's like real music and then there's boy bands, you know.

So having that kind of feeling going into it, that was why it was easy to kind of push against some of these old school ideas because they were the ideas that I didn't, the reasons I didn't like these bands is because they all looked the same and because they all felt very kind of PR pressed, you know.

It was always a really interesting project for me to try and to look at One Direction and think, well, how could we make this a little cooler?

I remember the real turning point in One Direction was when we put up the pre-order for our first single, What Makes You Beautiful.

I can't remember the number of how much we sold that week, but we broke some record out of the pre-order and we got told this.

We don't release any music at this point.

And I remember thinking, that's fascinating because they don't know what it's going to sound like yet, but they're invested.

That felt like power early on.

And it also felt like that we could rewrite the rule book because people were invested in us first.

As much, if not more than the music.

I think that's fair to say.