He might be known nowadays as a solo artist and Gigi Hadid's baby daddy, but to a large portion of the planet, Zayn Malik will forever be one-fifth of One Direction. Despite the fact that, since leaving the musical group back in 2015, Malik hasn't remained all that close with his former bandmates—from his supposed feud with Louis Tomlinson to Harry Styles not appreciating Malik trashing his boyband origins. However, the "What I Am" crooner was happy to reminisce about his wild days with 1D during a recent interview, and he even revealed how he stopped Styles from getting burned during a show.
While appearing on Hot Ones to promote his highly anticipated fourth studio album, Room Under the Stairs, Malik was asked by host Sean Evans about the "worst technical difficulty or machine malfunction" the singer-songwriter ever experienced while performing on stage, like getting "burned by pyro or [having] to endure a prolonged power outage." Malik then revealed:
I've actually never been burned by pyro. One time, there's footage of it, and it's actually amazing because it makes me look great. But, on stage, Harry [Styles] was right next to a pyro, and the pyro was about to go off because they were on timers. And he had a towel over his head and he had his head over the pyro, and he didn't see that the pyro was there. So you see me run from one section of the stage to push him out of the way, and the pyro kind of explodes right in front of his face. That was really dangerous.
Photos at the time of the 2013 near-disaster were published by The Daily Mail, showing the then-19-year-old Styles standing perilously close to the pyro flames. If it hadn't been for Malik's quick thinking and him pulling his bandmate to safety, Styles' face and famously floppy locks would likely have been singed by the flames. (It's especially ironic that Zayn was the one to save Harry, as the former revealed that the two men barely even talked while they were in One Direction together.)
The pyro panic was far from the only on-stage snafu that the band -- which also included singer (and The Voice coach) Niall Horan and Liam Payne -- experienced during their sold-out world tours. Malik told Evans that the group had a surprising go-to song that they would sing acapella to appease fans when their microphones were faulty during power outages:
In terms of technological difficulties, the whole rig would just go off sometimes. Like in our early gigs, we would have a power outage and there was no microphones, so we would just put our microphones down and we would just burst into 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' acapella, just do the whole performance of that until the microphones were working again. And that was the thing we had just, like, in our back pocket always. If the microphone goes, we still have that...I hope it entertained people! Yeah, funny times.
One Direction has been on an indefinitehiatussince January 2016 and all five members have explored solo stardom to varying success ever since. But now that the boyband gods have brought the likes of *NSYNC back together, maybe Zayn and the 1D fellas could put their differences aside for a long-awaited reunion. Just no pyro, please!
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Christina Izzo
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Christina Izzo is a writer-editor covering culture, entertainment and lifestyle in New York City. She was previously the Deputy Editor at My Imperfect Life, the Features Editor at Rachael Ray In Season and Reveal, as well as the Food & Drink Editor and chief restaurant critic at Time Out New York.Regularly covers Bravo shows, Oscar contenders, the latest streaming news and anything happening with Harry Styles.
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