Liam Payne asked his girlfriend Cheryl for advice on his new music.
The former One Direction singer released his debut solo single ‘Strip That Down’ on Friday (19.05.17), and has admitted his 33-year-old girlfriend – with whom he has two-month-old son Bear – gave him her "honest and brutal" opinion on the track before he shared it with the world.
Speaking to BBC Radio 1 on Friday, the 23-year-old musician said: "For the first part, I can’t show her anything. If I show her something that’s half finished, she’ll be like ‘no I don’t like it’.
"She’s open and honest and brutal. There’s a song I wrote on the album that she knows I’ve written, she’s like ‘no I hate it. It’s crap’. I’d rather she’d be honest. I wouldn’t want her to feed me any nonsense."
Liam and the former Girls Aloud singer first met on UK talent competition ‘The X Factor’ when she was a judge and he was auditioning for a place on the show at the age of 14.
For his debut album, Liam previously hinted he worked with ‘Shape of You’ hitmaker Ed Sheeran, and has now confirmed he got a phone call while he was in the gym in Los Angeles telling him the star was "writing a song" for him.
He said: "I’d got a phone call from the label and they said ‘Ed’s writing a song, you’ve got to get home now’.
"So we did a quick u-turn of the world, got down there and we did it in 30 minutes. He’s such a musical beast, you can’t stop him.
"Steve Mac, who did the production for ‘Shape of You’ and ‘Rockabye’, also was saying that Ed had phoned him up and was like ‘I feel like I’ve lost my songwriting powers. I need to come to the studio now’.
"It was his one day off in tour. He hadn’t written a song since October and he wrote three songs and he played me them and they’re amazing. And Steve was like ‘this boy doesn’t stop’."