“They make my friends and me so happy,” a One Direction fan called Lucy, aged around 14, told Radio 1’s Newsbeat this morning. “And they write all their own stuff.” Overcome by the thought of the Directionless year ahead, she began to cry. The average Radio 1 listener is 32, and quite possibly considers 1D’s upcoming hiatus a well-deserved respite for the public rather than a catastrophe – but they’ll have had an equivalent dark day in their own youth, whether it was waking up in 1996 to the news that Take That had split, or coping with New Kids on the Block throwing in the towel after Jonathan Knight left in 1995.
If anything, it may have been worse than what the “fandom” are going through today: with social media still a decade away, Take That and New Kids fans had no outlet to swap rumours with millions of other fans, no place to wonder where it all went wrong. There was such grief over Take That that the Samaritans set up a helpline – something that’s unlikely to be needed today, as Directioners enact their version of the Big Society and come together as a community. Having said that, 90s fans didn’t have to deal with the spitefulness of people who enjoy upsetting fanbases, such as the character – possibly an admirer of former member Zayn Malik - who tweeted: “I’m glad one direction split up, there shit anyway and now all these fake ass directioners can fuck off haha”.
Despite social media opening communication channels, as well as making bands themselves directly accessible – often to their detriment, as they reveal the depths of their dimness in ill-considered diss tweets – the culture of boyband fans hasn’t really changed much since the days of Beatlemania. If the internet had existed then, imagine the Tumblrs devoted to tearing strips off Yoko and Linda, and the hysterical memes that would have followed Paul’s announcement that he was leaving the band.
The nature of superfandom hasn’t changed because teenage girls haven’t changed. Even Directioners who’ve grown up playing by Twitter Rules – which encourage them to be as combative as they like, because there’s little chance of that Harry Styles fan carrying out her threat to stab them up – are genetically linked to the original Beatlemaniacs. Each generation goes through its own passion for cute boys in bands, allowing for permutations in taste – the physical scrawniness of the Bay City Rollers wouldn’t cut it today, while One Direction would have been considered rough (yes, really) in the 70s because of their tattoos. Falling for a boyband is a rite of passage – both a trial run for “real” relationships to come, and a bonding experience for girls.
Giving your all to the Rollers, 1D, JLS or even Blue (who were a bit too week-in-Ibiza to really qualify as a boyband) is intense and hormonal – emotions are at a peak, and likeminded girls form tight units, chivvying each other on. I’m still friends with one of the girls I met as a Rollers fan, and although she now pretends it never happened, we both know we spent night after icy Manhattan night waiting around outside hotels in the hope of glimpsing a striped sock. Decades later, female relationships are still the crux of the boyband industry. Girls have pow-wows during which knowledge is shared, and days are spent staking out hotels or TV studios. Rival factions emerge, and it’s considered a particular coup if one bunch throws another off the scent by claiming the band have already left an event when they’re really still inside. I’ve done it myself – happy days.
Directioners have been described as “among the best investigative journalists online today”, because of the hours they devote to sniffing out rumours and keeping an eye on the band’s activities. Even without the internet, my Roller friends and I successfully kept tabs on the band, using a network of male friends (who sounded plausible when ringing hotel switchboards), low cunning and ferocious determination. The emotional investment was immense then, and it’s even more so now, with social media tantalisingly putting bands almost within reach. The holy grail – forming a relationship with a teen idol – isn’t wholly impossible; Blue’s Lee Ryan had a baby with a fan, and 1D’s Louis Tomlinson is currently a father-to-be.
Thus, a boyband’s split can induce depression and despair. Lucy, who cried on Radio 1 this morning, is probably wondering how she’ll live the rest of her life without 1D in it (despite the split supposedly being temporary, it’s hard to imagine them mustering any enthusiasm for a reunion when their year-long hiatus is up). Happily for me, the Rollers never really disbanded; by the time they stopped making records in the early 80s, I’d moved on to the delights of Wham! But if they’d called it quits at their peak, I’d have felt as if a piece of my heart had gone with them.
• This article was amended on 27 August 2015 because the Bay City Rollers wore striped socks, not tartan as an earlier version said.
