5. Pussycat Doll
It was Anne who ultimately sent Harry his X Factor application when he got cold.
“People say I’m a good singer, and it’s usually my mom,” said the 16-year-old, who was already charming when he auditioned for The X Factor in spring 2010 and performed an a cappella rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.” “Singing is something I want to do, and if the people who can make it happen think I shouldn’t sing, that’s a huge setback to my plans.”
Well, they did and they didn’t. Harry didn’t stay in the last boy group, or even the penultimate boy group, but the show didn’t want him to go.
As fate would have it, Simon Cowell and Nicole Scherzinger, who replaced Cheryl Cole as guest judge, decided to group Harry with fellow aspiring solo artists Liam Payne, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson.
Scherzinger spoke about his usually uncredited role in catching lightning in a bottle in the 2013 documentary One Direction: Going Our Way. (On the other hand, Louis Walsh was another judge who infamously did not approve of Harry at all.)
However, it was Harry who came up with the name for the group.
“I thought it sounded good,” he recalled on CBS Sunday Morning in 2017. “We talked about the name a little bit, but honestly, I don’t know. I suggested it and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, we like that.’ Then it kind of stuck and that’s what it became.”
“Basically, we just came up with the idea of making up a bunch of names,” Zayn told Phoenix’s Hot 97.5 FM in 2012. “And that was one of the first names that Harry came up with. Harry just texted it to us and we were like, ‘Yeah, cool, cool.'” There were some really embarrassing ones that Liam came up with…what was the other one? USP—Unique Selling Point. ”
