They needed them, too.Īnd so, at the beginning of 2011, One Direction got to work. With the exception of the Jonas Brothers, American audiences really hadn't seen a monolithic boy band since *NSYNC. A few months later, One Direction was signed to Columbia Records stateside. He needed a new group just as much as One Direction needed to capitalize on their nascent popularity. Turns out, it was great timing for Cowell as well: another Syco boy band, Westlife, recently announced their retirement. (Not to knock his know-how, but with hundreds of girls lining up for them outside of the X Factor studio during the competition, it would've been hard to miss.) He signed the boy band to his Sony Music record label imprint, Syco Records, in January 2011 in the U.K. Cowell, an industry Svengali in his own right, instantly saw One Direction's potential. Short for Jack the Lad Swing, the R&B-pop group of adult men couldn't really be deemed a boy band, so the need was there. At the time, there weren't many popular male vocal groups in the U.K., save for an embryonic version of the Wanted and JLS. Losing the X Factor in December 2010 was a pivotal moment for 1D. Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, by Maria Sherman * They had something much more gargantuan in store. They came in third place on the show, but that didn't matter. A cover of Natalie Imbruglia's 'Torn' later, and One Direction ('1D' if you're nasty) was official.

After two weeks in the show's 'boot camp' program after auditions - an accelerated timeline for burgeoning friendships, let alone collaborative careers - something clicked. That decision, rumored to have taken Cowell ten minutes to come up with, would prove to be one of the most rewarding, simple experiments in modern pop music history.

Then, an epiphany: Simon Cowell (or Simon Cowell and guest judge/Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, if you take her account as the truth) had the idea to group Niall, Liam, Zayn, Louis, and Harry together to form a harmonic quintet, the youngest boy band the show had ever seen. They were all talented, but not yet great, and they obviously couldn't dance. Separately, X Factor judges Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, and Louis Walsh couldn't continue to advance the teenage boys in good faith. Who could have known that the cosmic microwave called existence would zap up a reality singing competition show, leading to the most glorious time in the universe, the creation of One Direction? That time might as well have been filled with darkness, because it wasn't until 2010 that one Irish lad and four young Brits from working-class families - Mullingar, Ireland's Niall Horan, the cute one Wolverhampton's Liam Payne, the responsible one Bradford's Zayn Malik, the shy one Doncaster's Louis Tomlinson, the class clown/bad boy and Redditch's Harry Styles, the heartthrob - auditioned as soloists on the seventh season of The X Factor. The spectacular explosion, the smallest singularity, inflated for nearly 14 billion years.

One direction band