I had just read some other news from Argentina. A dozy commuter, walking while scrolling, stepped into the path of a city tram. The cameras caught it all. He scraped by, with his life.

Liam Payne did not. At the age of 31, he has fallen 14 metres from a Hotel Casasur balcony, in Buenos Aires.

‘His injuries are incompatible with life’, is how the police chief described the scene. Apparently, the hotel had called for assistance before the occurrence, reporting a man acting boisterously, seemingly under the influence of either drink or drugs.

The full truth will emerge, with time. But it will not stitch back together the life of this young and precious man.

His sudden death, tonight, touches me greatly.

Which is somewhat surprising, given I could hardly pick him out from a line-up of fresh-faced Simon Cowell recruits. But this is part of the issue. These kids are plucked from normality at age 17, thrown about in the Fairground Spinning Tea-Cup that is pop for a bit, and then spewed out once the bloom has quit the rose.

He called it his ‘pills and booze’ face. Payne would develop a certain bloat which, when he saw it in photos, reminded him that he must respect his body, and his single functioning kidney, a bit more. His brief life jolted from health and sobriety, to the opposite, and back again.

Had music and fame not wooed his soul, he might have been a star athlete. As a teenager, ‘Payno’ was a distance runner of great talent, placed in the fastest three runners in England within his age category, for three consecutive years. The kid would awaken at 5am to run 5 miles before school. He narrowly missed qualifying for Britain’s Olympic Team.

He was a person of substance who had a voice of substance. Liam was often the front man, delivering those One Direction ballads which seemed to enchant and chew our ears during the 2010s. The band recorded 85 songs and staged 1,434 live performances. Mr Cowell keeps his boys busy. His factory workers rarely sleep.

Everyone, it seems, wants a bit of you when you’re on the up. Liam Payne lived through media-tised and sensationalised relationships with many women, among them Cheryl Cole and Naomi Campbell. The former was 10 years his senior;  the latter, 24 years older than her 26-year-old paramour.

What is this commoditisation of young people, so often framed as glamour, yet betraying all the signs of ghoulish disrespect?

The teenage girls clamouring for One Direction were manipulated by a media system which manufactures two dimensional heart-throbs. And the heart-throbs, in their turn, must strut their stuff and fall from view. There is little room for a third dimension.

Payne, by his own recounting, was born dead. The doctors couldn’t find any life in the infant, at first. He was premature, and frequently ill and hospitalised in his first four years. One of his kidneys did not function, scarred by these early experiences. He knew he needed to take care.

But somehow, it all fell to shit. I feel I know the story too well, though we know little, right now.

On the other side of the world, a rowdy and agitated young man falls from a height. His body lies in a courtyard off a street, in Buenos Aires.

There will be ringing of hands. There will be fine words, aplenty. But what of the system, and the people, who looked at precious Liam Payne, and saw only profit?