JADE shared some memories of her friendship with the late Liam Payne on a recent episode of ITV’s The Assembly.
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Payne died in October after falling from a third-floor balcony at a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Argentine prosecutor’s office later revealed that the 31-year-old’s cause of death was due to multiple traumas and internal and external bleeding.
JADE was the latest celebrity to appear on ITV’s The Assembly, in which stars are interviewed by a group of autistic, neurodivergent and learning disabled individuals who can ask them anything they like.
At one point, she was asked: “You were quite close with Liam Payne. There’s a lot of difficult stories out there and a lot of negativity surrounding him. I wondered whether you’d like to share a positive memory that you guys have and just talk about what he was like as a person.”
JADE said that Payne was “the first friend I made in the industry”. They met when both auditioned for The X Factor in 2010 and although Payne came third as a member of One Direction, JADE would be unsuccessful until she returned the following year and was put into Little Mix.
“He was just so lovely. He was obviously very talented, he really wanted to make his family proud, which he did. I remember everyone who was on the show at the time saying, ‘This person’s a star’. You could tell, he literally had the X factor. He was destined to be a musician and a singer.”
“I’m glad you asked that,” she added.
JADE will be making her Glastonbury debut later this summer. “With Glastonbury there is always a little bit of a thing with pop acts. But [I’m] very grateful to be given a slot at Glastonbury. It’s iconic isn’t it,” she said during an interview on the KISS Radio Breakfast Show.
Meanwhile, last month, Payne’s sister Ruth Gibbins wrote an emotional tribute marking the six-month anniversary of his death.
“6 months, half a year without you?! My head is still screaming for you. Each morning on waking, I feel like I am plunged underwater, gasping for air that never comes to relieve me,” she wrote.
Gibbins continued: “Living without you is impossible, so for now, I exist. I’m learning to laugh or smile in the right places, but mate, it’s exhausting when all I want to do is speak to you. In the few moments I allow myself to feel love and not just loss, I can really smile at memories of us, like last year when we were doubled over laughing at us tring to make something we’d seen on YouTube, but memories are always tinged with sadness at how unfair it is we can’t make new ones.”
“I can sometimes hear you laughing at me walking around like Whoopi Goldberg in ‘Ghost’, looking for you everywhere I go,” she wrote. “I see you though, you’re always coming through in different ways to put me back on the right path. I can’t process what’s happened and the finality of it, you know I will never stop doing all I can for you. I miss you loudly, quietly and in all the moments in between.”
