I interview them one by one, grabbing them and shouting ‘Sit’ like puppies, whereupon they peer at the chair and say, ‘This is very formal.’ Upstairs they try on yet more padded jackets and skinny jeans, and gab about Perry and debate which tops are ‘more Harry’ or ‘more Liam’, even though all the tops are exactly the same, and they are too. Then they rush off for some sweets.
The publicist brings them two bags of Haribo at 5pm every day, and come and leave me bits of noninformation like doggy treats. It’s odd, like trying to interview milk. I get confused about which is which, and keep asking them about the wrong girlfriends. I still can’t guarantee I’ve matched the right quotes to the right boy, but Liam is definitely a bit angry and cried at the Katy Perry movie Part of Me and recently worried about having ‘piss’ flung at him,
Because Cher Lloyd had that at a festival. Niall is frightened of sushi and is ‘too young’ for a girlfriend, but weirdly too old for his hair, which has Shane Warne highlights and has been like that since he was 12, ‘so I’m getting past it now’. He seems flustered by girls, ‘I don’t want a girlfriend, man, not yet’. His ideal date ‘would be a theme park’, he says,
So he wouldn’t have to make conversation. ‘Like, if you have dinner it’s awkward, and if you go to the cinema it’s been done a hundred times, so a theme park is a good way of not making it awkward.’ Who gets the most girls? ‘We wouldn’t ever objectify women, ever,’ he says, solemnly. I explain the question isn’t about objectifying them, just fancying them. He thinks. ‘Harry gets around, doesn’t he?’
