On a cold, dark Monday evening in December 2010, Zayn Malik went to HMV on Broadway in Bradford. He'd last been there a few months previously, to buy a CD. This time, however, Zayn was the pop star.

This was the week before the final of the X-Factor, in which Zayn's band One Direction were facing off against Cher Lloyd, Matt Cardle and Rebecca Ferguson for the crown of the insanely popular televised talent show.

Possibly you can't remember who actually won that year's X-Factor; One Direction didn't win, but as the next four-and-a-bit years went on to prove without a doubt, in the world of Simon Cowell's X-Factor machine, it's certainly not the winning that counts. Rather, it's how much money Cowell thinks you can make.

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UPDATE: BRADFORD POP STAR ZAYN MALIK QUITS ONE DIRECTION 'TO BE A NORMAL 22-YEAR-OLD' 

And One Direction didn't disappoint. Four platinum-selling studio albums, 14 singles, and - according to figures released last year - combined personal wealth of £70 million.

Back in December 2010, though, One Direction - Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan, and Harry Styles, as well as East Bowling's Zayn - didn't even have a record deal. Not that you'd have known it from the hundreds of young - and not so young - women who were waiting for 1D to show up after it had been announced just hours previously that they'd be visiting Bradford as part of a whistle-stop tour of the band-members' home towns to drum up support for Saturday's final.

I managed to get into HMV for a chat with Zayn before the lucky 250 who had secured wristbands allowing them to meet the band were allowed in. Zayn - then a month away from his 18th birthday - looked visibly shaken by the reception.

"I can't believe it, " he said, after security guards had ushered the boys into the store. "It's just crazy."

Looking through the shop windows at the fans being marshalled by the guards, he said all the right things for a pop star-in-waiting. "It's nice to get support from anywhere. But it means so much to me to get so many people from Bradford behind us."

Over the noise of the fans chanting his name outside, I asked him how this was different from the last time he'd been in to this particular store. "I was just a teenager in to buy a CD, " he laughed. "I never thought anything like this would ever happen."

And life was never to be the same again for Zayn Malik. Up until entering the X-Factor auditions he had been a student at Tong High School and lived with his mum Trisha, dad Yaser and sisters Doniyah, Waliyah and Safaa in a modest mid-terraced house off Wakefield Road. A couple of years into his success I went up there on the off chance of speaking to his family.

Trisha Malik has always been fiercely proud of her son - and, of course, protective of him and worried about him, as any mum would. He was a teenager with a pretty normal life in Bradford, and suddenly he was being feted with an almost hysterical devotion by hundreds of thousands of fans, and heading out across the world.

Simon Cowell's Syco Entertainment company, which pretty much owns 1D lock, stock and barrel, were in their own way fiercely protective of Zayn and his bandmates as well, to the point that his family were not allowed to speak to the press - not even the local paper - without clearing it with the powers that be.

That said, over the years I had many, many conversations with Trisha, even though they couldn't make it into print. 1D's first album, released a year after their X-Factor appearance, was pipped to the number one slot by Rihanna. But their second, Take Me Home, went straight to number one in November 2012 - the same weekend that the single from the album, Little Things, hit the top of the singles chart.

The whole family had gathered around the radio in East Bowling, and as soon as 1D scored the double Trisha sent Zayn a text message with the words: "Congratulations, superstar!".

Despite the superstar status thrust upon him, Zayn never forgot his roots - though could never make the journey back to Bradford as often as he would like. Mum Trisha maintained a scrap-book for him of all his mentions in the Telegraph & Argus, which he would pore over on his visits back as and when his schedule would allow.

It would be less than a year later that Zayn would propose to his girlfriend Perrie Edwards of the band Little Mix. The news would break as the premiere was held in London for 1D's first movie, This Is Us, which Trisha attended in full proud mum mode on the red carpet.

"It's true!" Trisha told me the next day, obviously over the moon. "I'm very happy for them. She is a lovely girl. I get on with her really well and her family are great, too. I wish them all the happiness in the world."

And it was a taste of Zayn's stardom for Trisha as well. "It was really, really brilliant. We got picked up in a car and taken to Leicester Square. We turned the corner and the roads were all cordoned off and there were thousands of people.

"My knees were shaking like jelly when I got out of the car. But then I thought, this is what Zayn has to deal with all the time, so I'm sure I can deal with it for ten minutes.

"There were all these girls shouting Trisha! Trisha! Trisha! , and then all the cameras were going off - click, click, click, click. I'll never forget that day for the rest of my life."

But being a mum trumps the glamour of the red carpet, and Trisha told me she had to cut short our conversation because she had to iron Zayn a shirt so he could "go to work".

Work, of course, was the latest promotional event for the movie, but it was a telling, touching moment, indicating that no matter how big Zayn was or would become, his family from Bradford were always going to keep him grounded.

Of course, there always comes some scandal with being a pop star. Last year, while on a tour bus in Peru, it was alleged that Zayn and bandmate Louis shared a cannabis joint. He found his every move scrutinised in the press. Earlier this month, after he was photographed close to another young woman in Phuket, Thailand, he was forced to assure fans he had not been cheating on fiancee Perrie. Then he bowed out of the 1D tour, citing "stress".

And this week Zayn Malik formally quit the boy-band that made his name and his fortune.

Zayn has apparently said that he wants to try living as a "normal 22-year-old". As 1D's star is still in the ascendant, with his millions in the bank, and as a seemingly permanent fixture of the tabloids, he might find that easier said than done.

But with his mum Trisha and the rest of his family - no longer living in East Bowling, now in a larger house bought by Zayn, but still in Bradford - as his safety net, he stands every chance of at least giving that a go.