A guest judge's deciding vote created the boy band member nobody expected to outlast the band itself.
At a glance
- Known for
- One Direction member, solo artist, three-time winning Voice coach
- Before fame
- Taught himself guitar at 11 from YouTube tutorials in Mullingar, Ireland
- Off-screen
- Co-founded a golf management company and co-owns a restaurant with DeAndre Hopkins
Rise to Fame
Katy Perry cast the deciding vote to keep him in the competition. Without her, there's no One Direction, at least not with him in it. He'd failed at bootcamp as a solo act, and the regular judges weren't convinced he was vocally ready. Nicole Scherzinger's fix was to throw him in with four other eliminated contestants and see what happened.
What happened was 70 million records sold worldwide. They finished third on The X Factor, which turned out not to matter. Simon Cowell signed them anyway, and within four years their Where We Are Tour grossed $290 million across 69 sold-out shows. He was the only Irish member in a group built from spare parts, and he's the one who kept building after the parts scattered.
In the Spotlight
Three seasons coaching The Voice, three wins. He's the only coach in the show's history with a 100% win rate, picking artists the flashier coaches pass on (19-year-old Gina Miles, blues singer Huntley, Aiden Ross) and turning them into champions.
The solo career keeps landing without anyone treating it as a main event. Flicker debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. The Show topped charts in six countries. His fourth album Dinner Party, due June 2026, closes with "End of an Era," a tribute to Liam Payne, who died in October 2024 after attending one of his Buenos Aires shows two weeks earlier. He's co-headlining stadiums with Thomas Rhett this summer. The boy band expiration date hasn't arrived.
Side Notes
His bandmates launched solo music careers. He co-founded a golf management company. Modest! Golf, started in 2016, now brokers deals for athletes like Trent Alexander-Arnold and Anthony Joshua, which says more about his ambitions than any album rollout. He holds a stake in Boston Common Golf alongside Fenway Sports Group and Rory McIlroy's investment arm, and co-hosts the Horan & Rose charity gala with golfer Justin Rose, which has raised over 1.5 million pounds for Cancer Research UK and other charities.
He taught himself the sport as a teenager, around the same time he was learning guitar from YouTube tutorials. Both hobbies turned into careers. Nobody screams at him on the fairway.