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Louis Tomlinson admits to smoking joints before going onstage with One Direction
Louis Tomlinson turned to smoking weed for some chill out time during stressful moments in One Direction.
Louis Tomlinson has opened up about his early days in One Direction, revealing that he was so anxious before live TV appearances and stadium shows that even smoking a joint backstage didn’t settle him.
The 34-year-old singer shot to fame as a member of the X Factor boy band when he was just a teenager in 2010, and he has admitted he simply wasn’t prepared for the scale of the group's sudden fame.
Asked by Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 how he coped with the intensity of it all, he replied: “Experience, I suppose. That’s all I could put it down to."
Tomlinson - who returned this month with his third solo album How Did I Get Here? - recalled one moment in particular that still makes him wince.
He admitted: “I shouldn’t have had a joint before I went on Good Morning America. That was not a good move.
“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to get absolutely trashed for this.’ I’d just had a joint and I was on morning TV.”
Despite the chaos around the band at the height of their fame, Tomlinson said he often relied on quiet moments — and the occasional smoke — to cope with the noise.
He said: “My life is so noisy, and I’ve always taken comfort in the quiet times. Growing up in a big family, you kind of need to.”
Lowe was stunned at the idea of Tomlinson lighting up on the tour bus before walking into stadiums packed with tens of thousands of fans.
Tomlinson said: “Once you build up the experience, you could do a lot of those One Direction shows — in fact, all of them. I’d have a couple of joints before. These days I won’t, not before a show. But back then, that was just the way it was.”
Even so, he said nothing could fully prepare him for the sheer force of the crowds.
He continued: “Even the strongest weed in the world — you walk out to a stadium with the crowds we played, it slaps you around the face."
Tomlinson insisted he never lost control onstage, joking that he was proud he never “pulled a whitey” in front of 80,000 fans.
Reflecting on the band’s dynamic, he said the five members were often the calmest people in the room.
He recalled: “Everyone else was flapping and stressing all the time. Having each other was massive. We had this bubble around us — it was impenetrable.”
He added that One Direction’s fans embraced the group’s imperfections, which helped ease the pressure.
The singer insisted: “We made mistakes all the time. If we forgot lyrics or fell over on stage, fans loved that. It meant the things everyone else stressed about didn’t feel that stressful to us.”
Tomlinson said that sense of camaraderie — and the band’s refusal to become overly polished — was a huge part of their appeal, adding: “We weren’t the kind of band wearing the same outfits, dancing like robots. Different things could happen every night. That’s what made people come back.”
Listen to the full interview here.
