Cowell put them in touch with hit American songwriter Savan Kotecha, a Max Martin protege, who, with a small team, produced their debut single, "What Makes You Beautiful." The song, released on September 11, was exactly what the young group required to not only sustain their hype post– X Factor but deliver on it: an affirming, high-energy, no-nonsense, perfect piece of pop that made them appear sweet, sensitive, and attainable, the kind of boys who put women on a pedestal. They needed them, too.Īnd so, at the beginning of 2011, One Direction got to work.
With the exception of the Jonas Brothers, American audiences really hadn't seen a monolithic boy band since *NSYNC. A few months later, One Direction was signed to Columbia Records stateside. He needed a new group just as much as One Direction needed to capitalize on their nascent popularity. Turns out, it was great timing for Cowell as well: another Syco boy band, Westlife, recently announced their retirement. (Not to knock his know-how, but with hundreds of girls lining up for them outside of the X Factor studio during the competition, it would've been hard to miss.) He signed the boy band to his Sony Music record label imprint, Syco Records, in January 2011 in the U.K. Cowell, an industry Svengali in his own right, instantly saw One Direction's potential. Short for Jack the Lad Swing, the R&B-pop group of adult men couldn't really be deemed a boy band, so the need was there. At the time, there weren't many popular male vocal groups in the U.K., save for an embryonic version of the Wanted and JLS. Losing the X Factor in December 2010 was a pivotal moment for 1D. Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, by Maria Sherman * They had something much more gargantuan in store. They came in third place on the show, but that didn't matter. A cover of Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn" later, and One Direction ("1D" if you're nasty) was official.
After two weeks in the show's "boot camp" program after auditions - an accelerated timeline for burgeoning friendships, let alone collaborative careers - something clicked. That decision, rumored to have taken Cowell ten minutes to come up with, would prove to be one of the most rewarding, simple experiments in modern pop music history. Then, an epiphany: Simon Cowell (or Simon Cowell and guest judge/Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, if you take her account as the truth) had the idea to group Niall, Liam, Zayn, Louis, and Harry together to form a harmonic quintet, the youngest boy band the show had ever seen. They were all talented, but not yet great, and they obviously couldn't dance. Separately, X Factor judges Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, and Louis Walsh couldn't continue to advance the teenage boys in good faith.
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