Harry Styles thanked his One Direction bandmates, including 'my dear friend Liam,' on his final Wembley night

Harry Styles does not usually get sentimental on stage. On Saturday night he made an exception.

Closing out the final show of a record-breaking 12-night run at Wembley Stadium, Styles stopped between songs to thank the four people he almost never mentions in concert: his old One Direction bandmates. "I wouldn't be on this stage if it wasn't for four friends of mine that were a massive part of this journey," he told the roughly 80,000 people packed into the stadium, according to The Independent. "I wanna thank Niall, Louis, Zayn and my dear friend Liam for these nights and everything that I learned in this time, the friendship, everything. None of this would be possible, I wouldn't be here without you, thank you so much."

It was the "my dear friend Liam" that landed hardest. Liam Payne died in October 2024 at the age of 31, after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires. Styles naming him alongside Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik, out loud, in front of a full stadium, is about as public as Styles ever gets about the band that made him famous. Fan videos of the moment were circulating within the hour. (One outlet, geo.tv, reported that Payne's parents were in the crowd for it, though that detail has not shown up elsewhere yet.)

How big the run actually was

Styles, now 32, just became the first act to play 12 shows at Wembley Stadium on a single tour. The previous records belonged to Taylor Swift and Coldplay, which tells you what tier we are talking about. The shows are part of his Together, Together tour, behind an album with the very Harry Styles title "Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally." The Independent handed the opening night four stars and called him "a charisma factory who lights the place up better than any pyrotechnics."

Then his sister crashed the stage

The other surprise of the night was Gemma Styles, Harry's older sister, who walked out to give a speech. The Styles family is famously allergic to the spotlight, and she opened by admitting it: "not somewhere I've ever wanted to be." Then she did it anyway.

"I don't think of you as this at all in day-to-day life," she told him. "I think of you as a brother and an uncle and a best friend. And seeing the incredible community that has formed around you is just indescribable, really." She thanked everyone who had been there "over the last 12 nights and the last 16 years," and brought up the day she dropped him at his X Factor audition in 2010, where One Direction was thrown together. "And now we're here."

Styles looked close to tears, hugged her, and told the crowd to "make some noise for Gemma Styles everybody."

What happens next

The Together, Together tour is not finished. Styles takes it to Sao Paulo, Mexico City, New York City and Melbourne, before wrapping in Sydney on December 13. Whether the One Direction shout-out becomes a nightly ritual or stays a Wembley one-off, nobody outside his camp is saying. For one night in London, it did the job.