Greg’s Up Yours Corona mission went international
Before the main anniversary, Scott tried to help Greg James with a Breakfast-show project.
Greg wanted people in all 193 countries of the world to deliver the message “Up yours, coronavirus” in their own language.
Fourteen countries had already been collected, including Bulgaria, Colombia, East Timor, Fiji, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Spain, Switzerland, the UAE and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Scott set about finding more.
Listeners in Greece, Iceland and Malta joined in, including Icelandic Eurovision star Daði Freyr.
The whole exercise was deliberately silly, but the premise reflected something very real: virtually every country was dealing with the same problem.
Ten years earlier, nobody had heard What Makes You Beautiful
23 July marked exactly ten years since One Direction were formed on *The X Factor*.
Scott had an unusually direct connection to the beginning.
Before *What Makes You Beautiful* had received its first proper Radio 1 play, One Direction had appeared on his show.
Fans were asked to guess what the lyrics might be despite never having heard the track.
The band then sang those invented lyrics in the studio.
Listening back a decade later was surreal. The timing was rough, the words were nonsense and even the actual melody was barely familiar to them because the record was still so new.
Within months it would become one of the biggest debut singles of the era.
Liam’s lockdown had included months away from Bear
Liam Payne joined Scott for the anniversary.
His lockdown had begun busily before settling down, but one of the hardest parts had been going around three months without seeing his son Bear.
Liam and Bear’s mum Cheryl had decided that keeping households separate was the safest option at the start of the pandemic.
Eventually the separation became too difficult and they found a way for Liam to see him again.
Boy-band memory had become a blur
Scott asked Liam what he remembered about that first Radio 1 visit.
The answer was: bits of it.
So much had happened so quickly that entire tours, cities and appearances had begun to blend together.
Liam joked about fans approaching years later with an old photograph and expecting him to remember the exact meeting.
He could not.
At one point somebody even asked whether he would like to visit the Philippines, apparently unaware that One Direction had already been there twice.
The microphone-stand routine was not missed
Liam chose Rihanna’s *Only Girl (In the World)* because it took him back to the early *X Factor* period.
He remembered One Direction performing with shiny microphone stands that had to be tilted and moved in synchronised choreography.
The routine was every bit as awkward as it sounds.
Scott also remembered their performance of Natalie Imbruglia’s *Torn* and the endless small mishaps that surrounded early One Direction.
That led, via one of the stranger old tabloid stories, to Liam correcting Scott that the alleged infection from contact with koalas was supposed to have been chlamydia, not gonorrhoea.
Liam would tell his younger self to relax
Scott adapted the 10-year-old-letter theme for Liam.
What would he say to the Liam sitting in Radio 1 ten years earlier, moments away from the first play of *What Makes You Beautiful*?
Relax.
Liam said he had taken the responsibility of being in One Direction extremely seriously.
He often became the organised member — the one worrying about schedules, behaviour and getting everybody where they were supposed to be.
At hotels he could wake up to reports that somebody had dived naked into the pool, ridden down stairs on a mattress or thrown something out of a window.
Somebody had to be “Mr Debbie Downer” and deal with it.
Liam wished he had allowed himself to enjoy more of the chaos at the time, knowing what he knew now: things were going to be all right.
One Direction once wrestled Kurt Angle in Los Angeles
Scott and Liam then unlocked a particularly bizarre memory.
During the band’s *1D Day* online event in Los Angeles, Liam had been given a wrestling segment with Olympic gold medallist and WWE star Kurt Angle.
Liam became “The Payne Train”.
Scott had somehow been recruited as referee despite having no real idea what he was doing.
The event was one of many One Direction memories that sounded almost fabricated a decade later: global boy band, internet marathon, Los Angeles car park and an actual professional wrestler.
The secret locations showed how huge it had become
Scott also remembered doing Radio 1 programmes with One Direction from undisclosed locations.
The secrecy was necessary because if fans discovered where the band were, the crowds could become a genuine safety issue.
Liam remembered *The X Factor* shutting down a street for the group and realising that what was happening around them was different from ordinary fame.
The scale was difficult to understand from inside it.
Midnight represented Liam’s present day
Liam also played his then-current collaboration *Midnight* with Alesso.
The video had been filmed during lockdown, another reminder of how different his solo career looked from the frantic years being revisited.
He chose other records he liked, including Drake and Chris Brown’s *No Guidance*, but much of the set naturally kept circling back to One Direction.
Scott remembered appearing briefly in the band’s film and delivering one of those grand documentary soundbites about the group being “unprecedented”.
Liam remembered Louis Tomlinson giving an equally excessive review of a Minions ride at Universal Studios — calling it “a triumph of the human spirit”.
Ten years on, the interview was less a conventional anniversary celebration than two people gradually triggering one another’s memories of how bizarre the whole period had been.
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