#or just lost it so utterly that everyone is like oooh... never mind BIG YIKES

[1ddiscourseoftheday]

Tues 23 March ‘21

The Dermot O’Leary podcast ft Niall is out! X Factor host Dermot being “the guy in the suit on the stage next to 1D throughout The X Factor in 2010” (he goes on to say “and I’m immensely proud of the boys in the band and how far they’ve come and the men they’ve become”, awww) they have lots of reminiscing to do! They start at the very beginning with Niall talking about the Irish tryouts being judged by Katy Perry, who told him, “don’t let me down!” “She still reminds me of it. I see her every now and then and she will always says ‘you know, you didn’t let me down’..she’s the one that let me through.” Dermot talks about all of the boys’ auditions (“I remember Louis, cause he was just devastated”) and then they just keep on going chronologically right through it (Dermot makes Niall rate every 1D XF performance lol); “we literally packed up a suitcase in September, moved into the X-Factor house and literally never came back. That was it.”

They go through the move into Princess Park (“we’d heard Girls Aloud had lived there as well, it was like the place where the groups go to live”) and whether they ever got time off (“I had knee surgery, so the boys had four months off then but I was in rehab every day.”) “When you’re in it it feels like 10 years… when you’re in the thick of that, it feels like it’s never going to end,” and the fan madness; “I have to be doing something all the time... I struggled with the idea of ‘why won’t you just let us out? We just wanna go for a walk.’ You can’t get inside the brain of a fan. Now, I completely get it. But at the time, you’re our age, let us out, we just want to walk down the street,” “Liam comes and goes cmon, let’s go, and Louis goes ‘just have a look out that window’ and he opened the curtains and the police had done a headcount and there was 10,000 people on the street.” That leads naturally to “there was no conversation of ‘lets leave it 20 years.’ It was just very much a conversation of ‘right lets not book anything because we’re all knackered.’ We’ve been working flat out since we were 16-17. It’s a bit of both, you can’t have your cake and eat it. I would’ve loved a couple years off but then within a year I brought out music. You miss the buzz. Whether it’s with the lads or not,” and to Niall’s first solo steps; “the first gig I did, when they were calling us to go on, I was like I’ll just wait here til the last minute, cause usually it’s like someone’s in the toilet, someone’s out for a cigarette.. and I get to the stage and there’s just one mic… quite a weird experience.”

So present day and onward? “I agree but coronavirus didn’t [that HBW is better than Flicker]. I personally just kind of felt really deflated over it. I just thought what’s the point of releasing it, you know what I mean? And I nearly pulled the album release. I was doing a week on the Late Late Show with James and Ben. I remember watching on TV Trump coming on and saying ‘I’m closing the border to Europe. You’re either in or out.’ So I flew back to the UK. Just as he was on TV, I said we need to pull the album, but it was minutes away from coming out in Australia. I wanted to cancel it.” Dermot says so what do you do now, do you just abandon it and move on or what, and Niall says, “I started coming up with some good stuff and thought well if I bump into something, I can release it when we can get out into the world a bit more and then it’ll attract people back to my last album,” and “This year has definitely made me... feel like I don’t have to be active all the time. And hopefully with the break, I can come out with my best stuff… I’ve learned more about myself this year than I have in any year of my life. Patience... I have definitely lived the most normal life that I’ve had in 10 years. Working out, cooking, even really mundane things like making my bed… all that kind of stuff that I never had the chance to do before because I was always on the move. For our listener: this is good insight cause it’s like… it’s a really abnormal life.” They also talk about golf and Niall says the most exciting person he’s gotten to meet is Michelle Obama (“she really took that first lady job by the... scruff of the neck” and “the [Obama] girls were fans of One Direction and they would come to our shows in DC, turn up in Escalades, bulletproof cars, and we weren’t even allowed walking down the same corridor.”)

Louis sent love to a fan going in for a third surgery, and we got storytime from a girl who talked about being present for the infamous Haylor pap shoot in Central Park who speculates that hmm, maybe they didn’t really date and it was just PR? They were only together for like 10 minutes and only to get their picture taken, she says, wouldn’t that be kind of weird if you were actually dating someone?! Lol. Yes, it would indeed.