English singer Boy George has revealed he regrets social media comments he made about Liam Payne just days before the former One Direction member died at age 31.
The Culture Club frontman admitted he made a remark that “wasn’t very nice” about Payne, who was laid to rest in a private funeral service on Wednesday (Nov 20), roughly a month after he died in Buenos Aires.
“In the case of Liam Payne, I’d watched him a few days before it happened,” he confessed on the latest episode of the High Performance podcast. “I remember watching online and I’d actually put a message under a post saying ‘He’s off his nut’, which wasn’t very nice, but I felt it. I felt like he was out of control.”
Upon hearing the tragic news of Payne’s fatal fall from a hotel balcony on Oct 16, Boy George said it brought back memories of the untimely death of Amy Winehouse at the age of 27 in 2011.
“When it happened, it just hit me, the same way that Amy Winehouse hit me, because it felt so senseless,” he told hosts Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes. “I was literally like ‘No, this isn’t real.’ I couldn’t take it in.”
On the podcast episode, released the same day as Payne’s funeral, the 63-year-old Karma Chameleon singer said he cares for Payne’s family and watched his father publicly grieve his death – describing it as “heartbreaking.”
“I was quite tearful about it,” Boy George said. “I actually really felt very sad.”
The British musicians previously had a row in 2013 after Boy George accused Payne on social media of snubbing his 13-year-old niece at the BRIT Awards. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
