Boy George regrets ‘not very nice’ comments about Liam Payne shortly before star’s death
Boy George has spoken out about comments he made prior to Liam Payne’s death (Karwai Tang/WireImage)
Boy George has said he regrets making some “not very nice” comments about Liam Payne shortly before the One Direction star’s death.
Speaking to the High Performance podcast, George admitted to speculating about Payne was out of control.
The “Same Thing in Reverse” singer said: “I’d watched [Liam Payne] a few days before it happened,” NME reported. “I remember watching online and I’d put a message under a post saying: ‘He’s off his nut’, which wasn’t very nice, but I felt it. I felt he was out of control.”
“And when it happened, it just hit me, the same way Amy Winehouse hit me, because it felt so senseless.”
Payne, who became part of One Direction on UK talent show The X Factor, died after falling from a third-floor hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, Argentina last month. Local police had responded to calls about a man who appeared to be under the influence of “drugs and alcohol” and was found “trashing [his] room”.
Authorities in Argentina have since charged three people with drug-related offences in connection with the incident. None of them have been named.
Commenting on his reaction to the news of Payne’s death, George said: “I was up at five in the morning and it came up on the American news. I was like: ‘What the fuck? No, this isn’t real’. I couldn’t take it in.
“I care about his family. I watched the dad, heart-breaking. I was quite tearful, I felt very sad.”
It was first thought that Payne’s funeral would take place in his home town of Wolverhampton but was instead held at St Mary’s Church, in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, on Wednesday (20 November), near to where he lived in a rented mansion.
Payne’s former bandmates Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik were among the mourners, alongside music mogul Simon Cowell who put the boyband together, and Payne’s ex-partner, Girls Aloud singer Cheryl, with whom he had one child.
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