Liam Payne Cancels Tour Due to Kidney Infection

Liam Payne is prioritizing his health.

On Friday morning, the “Strip That Down” singer, 29, announced he was canceling his upcoming tour of South America after being hospitalized with a kidney infection.

“Hey guys this really is the last news I want to be telling you but basically I’ve been a little bit unwell recently and I ended up in the hospital with a bad kidney infection,” he began in the X (formerly known as Twitter) video. “We’ve started rehearsals and I’ve just been advised that now’s really not the right time to be out on the road trying to recover from this.”

He added, “The best people around me are trying to help me recover as we speak but yeah we’re going to have to reschedule it all. Please look out for ways to refund your tickets. I’m looking forward to seeing you guys soon. Hopefully we’ll put on an even bigger and better show. Thank you and sorry.”

In the caption section, Payne wrote that his team is working to reschedule but for now tickets will be refunded at point of purchase.

The tour was set to kick off in Lima, Peru, on Sept. 1 and wrap on Sept. 12 in Mexico City.

In July, the former One Direction member revealed that he was nearly six months sober after spending nearly 100 days in a rehab facility in Louisiana.

“I just kind of feel like I’ve got more of a grip on life and everything that was getting away from me, I just feel like I’ve got more of a handle on it,” Payne said in an eight-minute video on YouTube. “I just needed to take a little bit of time out for myself actually because I kind of became somebody who I didn’t really recognize anymore. And I’m sure you guys didn’t either. I was in bad shape up until that point and I was really happy to kind of put a stopper to life and work.”

While away, Payne was completely cut off, he said, in order to focus on his recovery. “I didn’t have my phone for nearly 100 days,” the singer said. “I didn’t connect with the outside world at all. Upon leaving, the hardest part was turning the phone back on because it was a little bit scary.”

Though the process “worked to a certain extent,” Payne noted “there was still little things that I had to deal with for myself.” So he went to Dubai where, while at a Hans Zimmer concert in January, he had an “ah-ha” moment that inspired him to stop drinking.

Ever since then, Payne has “just been trying to get to know this new guy,” he shared, of himself. “I’m very lucky, thanks to you guys at home and thanks to this wonderful life that I have, that I had a vehicle to do that, which is music.”

Part of the process of moving forward has also included looking back on his past behavior through a new lens — like a June 2022 interview Payne did with Logan Paul in which he spoke critically about his former One Direction bandmates, including Zayn Malik, whom he said he “disliked.”

“A lot of what I said came from the wrong place,” Payne said, “I was so angry at what was going on around me and instead of taking a look inwards I decided to look outwards at everybody else and I took it out on everybody else, which is just wrong, really.”

In May, he revealed he was working on a new album, while his last record was 2019’s LP1.