Liam Payne set out early on his path to fame, appearing on The X Factor as a fresh-faced and floppy-haired 14-year-old, charming judges who included the future mother of his child, Cheryl Tweedy.

Performing Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon, he struck the former Girls Aloud star as “cute”. And while Liam’s first effort ended in tears, flown to Barbados only to be sent packing by Simon Cowell, he would be back.

Two years later, Liam was chosen as the leader of a cobbled-together boy band who would go on to become the ITV talent show’s biggest hit by some distance – One Direction.

Aged just 16, he left mum Karen, dad Geoff and his two sisters in Wolverhampton to move into a London mansion with his new bandmates. There was no time for looking back.

Thanks to the growing role of social media, One Direction were already huge before anyone had even seen them perform.

Liam had 30,000 Twitter followers before the group’s debut on the X Factor live shows, watched by 14 million viewers.

Their debut album Up All Night topped charts in 16 countries in 2011 and made them the first British act to hit No1 in the US Billboard chart at the first attempt – something not even the Beatles had managed.

By the time they played New York’s Madison Square Gardens in December 2012, performing hits such as Live While We’re Young and What Makes You Beautiful to 20,000 fans, Liam and the boys were global superstars.

On the tour film, released the following year, mum Karen, a nurse, appeared with a lifesize cardboard cut-out of her 19-year-old son. “If I have this, I can still see him every day,” she said.

Liam’s parents were not the first to find out fame at a tender age can have a high price.

“He left home my little boy and became the boy in a magazine,” Karen sobbed.

“When I see him on stage, I absolutely burst with pride but we do miss him so much.”

Geoff, a fitter, teared up as he told of missing Liam’s “rites of passage”, saying: “He’s the only lad in the family and I’ll never get this time back. He’s gone.”