Louis Tomlinson admits it's 'a bit of a shame' seeing BTS surpass One Direction's records
Louis Tomlinson says that no matter how many records BTS break, they will never replace One Direction.
Louis Tomlinson says no band - not even BTS - can emulate One Direction.
The 34-year-old star is a member of one of the biggest boy bands in the world, but since their heyday, the likes of K-pop juggernaut BTS have proved strong competition, which Louis admits is "a bit of a shame".
He told Billboard: "It’s not something I’ve paid loads of attention to. There was a time when BTS was on the way up, and I felt like, every time I logged into Twitter, they’d just taken one of our records for something — some fastest-selling thing, and they’d take it away! It was just a bit of a shame! But I don’t begrudge them that — that’s the nature of the music industry, it keeps moving."
Louis - who is returning with his third solo album, How Did I Get Here?, on January 23 - continued: "But I still don’t think there’s been anything similar, really, to One Direction. I’m sure people are trying, but I think what was really interesting about One Direction [was] pretty much every boy band that had come before us would fit into a quite specific mold. There was a way of doing boy bands back in the day — dressing in the same outfits, dancing. We broke free from that mold."
Elsewhere, Louis admitted it's tricky picking songs from the 1D catalogue to perform in his solo sets now, as a 34-year-old, because some of the lyrics are so "raunchy".
He said: "For starters, I like to pick one that I wrote — but the biggest challenge is finding a lyric that feels all right to sing as a 34-year-old guy. And that’s actually not the easiest thing to do, because some of those One Direction lyrics are f****** raunchy, man, proper! But it’s also a really fun thing to try and integrate something sonically. We do a version of “Night Changes” that’s got some real tempo behind it — Sam Fender was an inspiration for that composition of it. That’s a full-circle feeling of a song that I sang in the band, and now I’ve found a way for it to fit in [my] set."
