12/29/2023 0 Comments One direction itunes video diary![]() ![]() “If you listen to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ or ‘One Thing,’ they have two-finger guitar riffs that everyone who can play a bit of guitar can learn. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” Falk says. The greatest thing popular music can do is make someone else think, “I can do that,” and One Direction’s music was designed with that intent. They’d all studied at the Max Martin/Cheiron Studios school of pop craftsmanship, and Falk says they were confident they could crack the boy-band code once more with songs that recalled BSB and ‘NSync, but replaced the dated synths and pianos with guitars. To craft that sound on 1D’s first two albums, Up All Night and Take Me Home, Kotecha worked mostly with Swedish songwriters-producers Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub. “The guitar riff had to be so simple that my friend’s 15-year-old daughter could play it and put a cover to YouTube,” says Carl Falk It would come out of left field and become something owned by the fans.” And I felt like the only music you could really do that with is fun, poppy guitar songs. I felt like a kid again when I was around them. “Me and Simon would talk about how was Beatlesque, Monkees-esque,” Kotecha continues. Instead, the reference points for 1D went all the way back to the source of contemporary boy bands. In 2010, Kotecha remembers, “everybody was doing this sort of Rihanna dance pop.” But that just wasn’t a sound One Direction could pull off (the Wanted did it only once) and famously, they didn’t even dance. ![]() The common thread linking all great boy bands, from New Kids to BSB, he says, is, “When they’d break, they’d come out of nowhere, sounding like nothing that’s on the radio.” He first witnessed their power back in the Eighties, when New Kids on the Block helped his older sister through her teens. Kotecha, who met 1D on The X Factor and shepherded them through their first few years, is a devoted student of the history of boy bands. One Direction’s songs were great and their charisma and chemistry undeniable, but what made them stick was a sound unlike anything else in pop - rooted in guitar rock at a time when that couldn’t have been more passé. It’d been a decade since the heyday of ‘NSync and Backstreet Boys, and the churn of generations demanded a new boy band. Most of it was mumbled - a temporary place-holder - but there was one phrase: “Better than words …” A few hours later, on the bus to another city, another show - Bunetta and Ryan can’t remember where - Liam asked, maybe having a laugh, “What if the rest of the song was just lyrics from other songs?” At one point, Liam got up to use the bathroom, and when he re-emerged, he was singing a melody. The second takes place a few years later: Another hotel room in England - this one in Manchester - where songwriters and producers Julian Bunetta and John Ryan were throwing back Cucumber Collins cocktails and tinkering with a beat. The first will be familiar to any fan: Songwriter and producer Savan Kotecha was sitting on the toilet in a London hotel room, when he heard his wife say, “I feel so ugly today.” The words that popped into his head would shape the chorus of One Direction’s unforgettable 2011 debut, “What Makes You Beautiful.” A bathroom figures significantly in the origin stories of at least two classic One Direction songs.
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