Heartbreaking: I had a front-row seat to One Direction’s rise to fame — here’s how drugs, girls and stress tore them apart…see more

One Direction found fame inside a nondescript North London TV studio, next to a McDonald’s and opposite a kebab shop — and I had a front row seat for the making of the world’s biggest boy band.

Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik were just teenagers in 2010 when they were brought together as a band on “The X Factor,” Simon Cowell’s talent show that aired in the UK on Saturday nights.

As TV Editor at The Sun, one of Britain’s best selling newspapers, I would regularly sit backstage, gossiping with Cowell and judge Louis Walsh in their dressing rooms. (Cowell always puffed on his trademark Kool menthol cigarettes, despite a studio ban on smoking.)