Ayeasha Higgins, Zali Davis and Mahalia Carmody, all 15, are wearing homemade One Direction T-shirts. The shirts bear their favourite 1D lyrics, printed neatly so as to fit all three lines: “Here we go again. Another go around for all of my friends. Another night stopped, will it never end?”
It is just minutes before the start of the first show of the band’s new world tour, On the Road Again, and the second time the three Sydney teens have seen the five-piece boyband perform. What are they hoping from the show this time around?
“For them to get naked!” a girl in the row in front wheels round to interject with enthusiasm.
“Yeah, they might take their shirts off,” says Davis. The next best thing is if the shirts get wet.
“It might rain,” she says, looking hopefully skywards.
The music video that had been idly playing on the big screen abruptly cuts out and everyone begins screaming. It turns out to only be the prerecorded voice of Harry Styles telling the audience not to stand on chairs and to drink plenty of water. They scream anyway.
Then Styles and fellow members Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne finally appear on stage, at the top of a pyramid shooting fireworks to the escalating introduction of Clouds. The hysteria escalates.
The five members of One Direction sing mostly in tune and showcase impressive nuance and control given their age and experience – not to mention the size of the venue. Malik in particular shirks his duties in terms of crowd interaction in order to concentrate on held notes and vocal runs.
A decent chunk of the 23-song setlist come from Four, the band’s most recent album, on which they embrace anthemic rock and 80s-style power ballads. This new musical turn suits a stadium setting, with song two, Steal my Girl, taking them dangerously close into Journey territory.
But hours later it’s the high-pitched screaming – not the three-part harmonies or flourishes – that are left ringing in my ears. Every opportunity for the crowd to leap to full voice is taken, such as when Horan imitates an Australian accent or Styles asks if it is anyone’s birthday. “It can’t be all your birthdays,” he says indulgently to 10,000 white liars. The compromise is a group singalong addressed to just one person whose birthday it almost certainly isn’t. No one begrudges the opportunist – when Harry Styles asks “birthday?” you say “how many candles?”
There’s a wholesome fun to a One Direction show at odds with both Styles’s habit of wearing shirts unbuttoned to his navel and the saucy suggestions posed to individual band members on a couple of handmade signs. (“I don’t want to draw attention to them,” Payne fusses.)
And in such an enormous and expensive production – fireworks shoot off the stage for every other song, combined with lasers in the four-song encore – the band themselves often seem the least polished thing about it. One minute there’s an LED cube rising out of the stage to hold the band aloft and next a section one assumes is marked on the setlist as “Louis and Liam talk among themselves for a bit”.
“Not one of the best chitchats we’ve ever had,” admits Tomlinson. “It’ll get better.”
But such haphazard banter between songs is somewhat charming, like unscripted children’s television, punctuated with a fair few shouts of “SYDNEYYY” and calls-and-response. “How are you doing over there?” asks Styles affably and almost perfunctorily to one section of screaming bodies, then turns 180 degrees: “And how are you doing ... over there?” For at least some of the show he appears to be chewing gum.
Malik apologises for the band being “massively unfit and slightly on the unhealthy side”, then, at Sunday’s show, alludes to having been told off for it. Horan remarks how there are far fewer people there on the second night than there had been on the first. It’s not so much a parting of the veil as it is a dropping of the towel.
It wouldn’t happen at a Beyoncé or Katy Perry show, where no moment is unaccounted for, no movement imprecise. But an enormous part of 1D’s appeal is their apparent accessibility, their lack of polish, their puppy-like enthusiasm: they’re not one of the biggest bands in the world, they’re a bunch of lads, and the Directioners wouldn’t have it any other way.
Whenever 1D asks the crowd to “sing it” during crowd favourites One Thing and What Makes You Beautiful, they follow up with “nailed it”. An audience member is awarded precious stage time to tell a joke: “What did one hat say to another? You stay here, I’ll go on ahead.”
The two-hour performance is more about the relationship between band and fans than it is the music or the spectacle. Slick choreography would fit in about as well as Beyoncé opening up the floor for a good knock-knock gag, before segueing into Partition.
The band’s super fans, called One Directioners, feel they can share in their idols’ success largely because they’re told, repeatedly, that they created it. It follows a rule all the world’s most popular music acts right now know: it pays to invest, deeply and meaningfully, in your core fanbase (just look at Taylor Swift sending her fans Christmas presents). But it seems more natural, more sincere, with One Direction because of their genesis in reality TV, however distant that X Factor third place must seem from the front of a sold-out stadium on the other side of the world.
“Did you have a good time? If you had a good time, I think that’s ultimately all that matters,” says Styles, philosophical, then mischievous: “We say that because it allows us to make some mistakes.”
• One Direction are touring Australia throughout February with other international dates to follow
