We knew Liam Payne when Kate Cassidy fell in love with him & know exactly why he was the soulmate she dreamt of marrying

LIKE millions of teen girls around the world, Kate Cassidy heartbreakingly admitted this week she fell in love with One Direction’s Liam Payne when she was just 10 years old. It was 2010. Five normal lads from the UK and Ireland had auditions for The X Factor but they’d failed to make it through bootcamp. Music mogul Simon Cowell and guest judge Nicole Scherzinger put their heads together and saw the potential these boys had then formed 1D to be part of the Groups category. They didn’t even win the show.

Little did anyone know those five teens were going to become the biggest and best-selling boyband of all time, let alone Kate, who had been Liam’s girlfriend for two years at the time of his tragic death last year, and had planned to marry him. Speaking exclusively to The Sun the now 25-year-old said: “Liam was my childhood crush. I have loved him since I was ten. I think we were meant to meet. “Growing up, I had posters on walls. I think I had a One Direction one but I don’t know if I had his solo poster. But I did have him at some point on my wall.”.

Chances are, it could have even been one of the four Fabulous 1D covers Kate remembers being on her wall. As we read her heartbreaking interview where she said from the moment she met Liam, she “genuinely believed” they “were soulmates” and admitted he was “ the most humble, charming, normal person you could ever hope to come across,” we knew exactly the cheeky lad from Wolverhampton she was talking about.

We first shot the band in 2011, a year after they’d won the hearts of the nation on The X Factor. And, like Kate, Liam immediately made an impression on us too. He was always the slightly mischievous one who loved to play pranks, but who also readily took on the role of being responsible for the others. By the time we shot our next cover with them in America in 2013, they were at the height of their fame and we got a small taste of what it was like to be them.

When we shot them in 2012, they had just returned from a successful tour of the States, becoming the first UK boy band to truly crack America, going to No.1 in the Billboard Chart and selling out New York’s Madison Square Gardens in minutes. Liam and Louis were constantly up to mischief that day. They drove their minder Paul Higgins mad, grabbing a couple of Boris bikes and disappearing down a towpath near our north London studio.

At another shoot the day before, the pair had somehow ended up on the roof of the studio in a bid to hide from their team who just rolled their eyes, as they were used to their hijinks. Liam had already confided their plans that day: “What we’ll do is we’ll take pictures of ourselves and send them to Paul so he doesn’t know where we are and he’ll have to guess. When we went to the Olympics the other day, we snuck out and because we had passes, we could get everywhere and we blagged our way into so many things.

We were absolutely everywhere and we sent Paul all these pictures.”. The results of that shoot were five different covers that saw 1D fans search the length and breadth of the country to get an issue featuring their favourite band member (or all five if they were lucky). By the time we shot our next cover with them in America in 2013, they were at the height of their fame and we got a small taste of what it was like to be them.

Thousands of fans turned up at hotels around the Texan city of Houston, hanging around lobbies and keeping watch like hawks to find where the boys were staying. A ring of steel had to be thrown around our cover shoot and security guards were hired to make sure fans didn’t discover the top-secret location. We should have known that when it came to direction, resistance was futile. Let’s just say Captain Sensible isn’t so sensible any more.

Despite the shoot taking place in the middle of an off-the-beaten-track location, the fans found us and as word spread, the crowds (and the screams) grew. This didn’t faze the boys in the slightest. They were used to always attracting a huge amount of attention. Their team had concerns, though. A few of the boys were smokers and, with a clean-cut image to protect, no one wanted the fans or paparazzi to catch them with a cigarette.

But in the end, that’s exactly what happened. Before our shoot was over, Twitter (as it was then known) was awash with pictures of the boys puffing away, to the exasperation of the 1D team. Liam was his usual charming, friendly, generous self that day, but there was a new kind of edge to him. The Liam of a couple of years before would not have wanted the fans to spot him or any of the other boys smoking, and he’d have gone to great lengths to make sure that didn’t happen.