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Rock musician Pete Townshend has claimed that young female fans of bands such as One Direction are “fickle” and move “from one band to another quite quickly”.
The Who co-founder and guitarist, 79, is currently promoting his new multimedia project, The Seeker, a collaboration with his wife, composer and writer Rachel Fuller.
In a joint interview with Fuller in The Telegraph, Townshend discussed the “rock star condition” in the wake of the death of former One Direction star and solo singer Liam Payne.
Payne died aged 31 after falling from the third-floor balcony of his hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he had travelled to see his former bandmate Niall Horan perform two weeks earlier.
Discussing their project, a musical telling of Siddartha in which the character is gripped by sickness and anxiety after accumulating “great wealth”, Fuller compared it to the effect of “wealth… and privilege and notoriety” seen in footballers.
Townshend disagreed, pointing out that “The Who were never wealthy” in the early days of their success and their “hedonism” was instead driven by “the fact that we were very young, we became famous very quickly, and that our audience was mainly boys”.
“The thing about One Direction,” he said, “was that they were a huge hit suddenly, and their audience was 90 per cent girls. And girls are very flippant. They’re fickle. They move from one band to another quite quickly,and one artist to another.”
Journalist Craig McClean wrote in the Telegraph article that the musician’s statement “feels neither fair nor true – One Direction fans have remained staunch even in the decade since the boy band’s split” in 2016.
Born in Wolverhampton, Payne shot to global fame as one of One Direction’s five members after they competed on the ITV reality show The X Factor in 2010. They achieved a string of No 1 hit singles and albums, before embarking on their respective solo careers.
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Townshend maintained his stance as he discussed The Who’s early fame: We’re not going to be like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or The Kinks. We’re not going to work for screaming girls. We’re going to work for the boys.”
The Independent has contacted Townshend’s representative for comment.
Payne’s sudden death on 16 October sparked an outpouring of grief from both his fans, family, former bandmates and fellow musicians.
In both joint and individual statements, his One Direction bandmates Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik and Horan said they were “devasted” by his death, while pop singer and former X Factor judge Cheryl, the mother of Payne’s seven-year-old son Bear, called it an “indescribably painful time”.
It was confirmed this week that Payne’s body has been released to his family to be flown back to the UK ahead of his funeral.
