Former One Direction singer and now solo star Zayn Malik revealed in the new issue of British Vogue that he left the pop superstar group “without having made one single friend.”
Malik, who famously split the band in March of 2015 without warning from the other members which included Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne, and Niall Horan, revealed that he always felt a bit “like an island.”
He remarked to the magazine, “Yeah. I have always been a bit like that, though – always a bit of an island. I don’t like to confer with too many people.”
Does he see any of the band still? “Nah. I ain’t spoke to any of them for a long time, to be honest with you. That’s just the way it is. There’s things that happen and things that were said after I left… Snide things. Small things that I would never have expected.”
The band continued on without him, doing two successful stadium tours and releasing two albums before dating an “indefinite hiatus” in 2016 after the release of their album Made In the A.M.
The Muslim-raised British-Pakistani working-class boy from West Yorkshire shot to fame as a member of British X-Factor success story One Direction, beginning in 2010 after Simon Cowell, a judge on the series, decided that the boys, who all auditioned as solo acts, would work better as a vocal quintet.
.@ZaynMalik features in the December issue of British Vogue – read the exclusive preview https://t.co/P9JLXUmwmX https://t.co/eGpoLlRHM7
— British Vogue (@BritishVogue) November 6, 2018
Malik would later leave the band at its peak to blaze his own path as a solo artist.
He moved to the United States, released the album Mind of Mine, and began a high-profile relationship with supermodel Gigi Hadid.
But he seems to not be able to get over his boy-band past, complaining that the band just never had time to just settle into their success.
“We went from theaters to arenas, to stadiums – there was never any sort of bridge between. Just boom, boom, boom,” he said to Vogue.
“I guess that kind of progression to any mind – but especially when you’re 17, 18 – it kind of effects you a little bit. People take it different ways – especially when there are five different personalities. The relationships had broken apart,” he shared.
He also revealed that there is now no relationship with the other members of the band, despite tabloid reports to the contrary.
Zayn currently lives in SoHo, New York, with Hadid, having weathered a very public breakup earlier in 2018.
“Everything is great,” he said to Vogue. “She’s super-organized and I’m really not. It helps that she can get things together for me a little bit. I lean on her a lot.”
Zayn has been working on a follow-up to his freshman album debut since 2017. There is no word as to when he will release new music.