Who wouldn’t beJEALOUS of me? I’M THE POSTER GIRL for someone whohas it all.
Lily Allen was the first woman to acknowledge that if Kim Kardashian’s derriere didn’t actually break the internet, then it would certainly establish a thought-provoking divide. ‘The creative director of Paper magazine is my friend and he was at my place in the country at the weekend,’ she explains, having just returned to London from her Cotswold manor house. ‘He showed me the shots before they put them out there,’ Allen explains. ‘I said, “Wow! Double wow!”’
She promptly posted the cheeky picture on her Instagram photo account, saying, ‘All anyone will talk about today.’ She was right, the portrait of the amply proportioned starlet balancing a glass on her jutting behind, the better to catch an arc of bubbly, is still splitting opinion.
‘It’s cool,’ Allen laughs. ‘I like it. But it is shocking, which is great.’
We are in a car heading to Heathrow, where Allen will take a flight to Dubai for a one-off show. This is More’s second meeting with Lily Allen in two months. She has used these interviews, in London and New York, to talk freely, frankly and exclusively on ‘anything you want’, including Band Aid, booze, celebrity scuffles, losing a baby, making money and loathing Nigel Farage. But right now she is itching to instigate a big bottom referendum.
The ocean of baby oil used in the Kardashian shoot is a shared ecoconcern. Nice shape, but too big, opines Allen’s driver Paul. ‘Really?’ Allen marvels. ‘Not the bigger the better? Oh, this is interesting.’ I suggest that you could probably land a helicopter on it.
‘You can rest a champagne glass on it,’ she says, delighted with the downward direction the conversation has taken. ‘And that’s pretty impressive. Actually, I like the image. I’m not attracted to women in that way so I can’t really say if it’s actually attractive or not but... it’s quite amazing.’
This techie gush is in complete contrast to the Lily Allen who, six weeks before, had told me that she would prefer the information superhighway to be shut down for good. ‘I wish the internet didn’t exist,’ said the woman whose career was spun upon the worldwide web. ‘It’s just bad. For the creative industries it’s not done anyone any favours – writers are out of work, people are publishing crappy pictures because that’s all anyone wants to look at any more.’
With her 30th birthday coming up next May, Allen, outspoken provocateur, outlandish trendsetter and relentlessly controversial pop star has finally found a little peace. ‘I’ve started accepting who I am and – clichéd as it sounds – I’ve started to feel comfortable in my own skin,’ she says.
Allen’s professional life has been a stopstart success. She emerged on the original social media site Myspace in 2005 – all ball gown and trainers, cute fringe and glottal stops – full of cheeky charisma and cocky confidence. Her first single Smile went to No.1 in the British charts and No. 6 in the Irish charts in 2006, her debut album
Alright, Still, has sold more than 2.5 million copies around the world and was nominated at the Grammy and Brit awards. The 2009 follow-up, It’s Not Me, It’s You, reached No.1 in Britain and No.3 in Ireland and sold a further 2.5m copies. She has shifted units.
But Allen’s musical output – infectious, whip-smart pop – has long been overshad-
The celebrity feuds. Her chaotic childhood. Those X-rated lyrics. And why she won’t make any excuses for being rich, successful and happy. Well, Lily Allen didn’t become one of our sassiest singers by keeping her opinions to herself...
owed by her reputation as a notorious rent-a-gob and ubiquitous celebrity. It’s still difficult to open a laptop without her latest adventure filling your screen. A recent internet-tickler was a snapshot of Allen surrounded by boxes of condoms.
She says she’s not remotely bothered by her detractors. ‘If anyone wants to hate me, go ahead,’ she announces blithely. ‘Hand on heart, I do not care.’ But of course she does. She has simply developed a resilient media persona. Insults? She has heard them all. One-hit wonder, lousy singer, mockney posho, unfit mother, ‘a feral woofy dog’, spoilt little rich girl, everything that is wrong with society today... I suggest she’s like a punk-rock Kate Middleton, and it takes her by surprise. She looks offended, confused, amused, and then, as often happens in these situations, she takes a puff on her cigarette and squints towards the horizon enigmatically, allowing herself time to think. ‘Poor old Midders,’ she says, anointing the Duchess Of Cambridge with a finishing-school nickname.
‘I feel for Kate Middleton. Being in her situation and being pregnant as well, it must feel so suffocating. It was suffocating enough when I was pregnant... but to be part of that institution and to not be born into it and to have to uphold its models must be so... claustrophobic.’
‘Actually, I should watch what I say,’ she chuckles. ‘I’ve got to go to a thing at Clarence House [the royal residence] soon.’
There, in a sense, is Allen’s dilemma. She can’t keep her mouth shut yet she still gets invited to all the best parties.
We collected her this evening from a pizza place in Notting Hill, where she had enjoyed supper with ‘my babies’ – husband Sam Cooper, a 37-year-old building boss, Ethel, three next week, and one-year-old Marnie.
Dinner was finished by 6pm as Allen’s flight was leaving in two hours. Such is the schedule of a musician and mother.
She slumps despondently into the back of the car, but within minutes her mood has lightened sufficiently to have an early-evening pop at Band Aid 30. ‘I got an email asking me to do it,’ she says, of a communication from Bob Geldof ’s Band Aid office, which she declined. ‘Well... I’m not on it, am I? It’s difficult to give an explanation why I didn’t do it without sounding like a complete c***,’ she says, dropping the cbomb for the first of many times.
‘I prefer to do my charitable bit by donating actual money and not being lumped in with a bunch of people like that.’
And what of Geldof, the man she once dubbed ‘a sanctimonious prat’? Will he feel snubbed, as he did with Adele, who ignored Bob’s calls and made an Oxfam donation instead? Is Lily not afraid of being ‘charity-shamed’?
‘I don’t care if Bob’s got the hump with me,’ Allen says. ‘I actually don’t mind Bob. He doesn’t give a s*** and he’s grumpy, like me.’
Allen can be more than grumpy. There have been occasions when she has been downright savage. In 2008, she had to be restrained after throwing a punch at a passer-by who had heckled her outside a jazz club in London. She had a traumatic 2008 (a miscarriage; the breakup of her relationship with Ed Simons of The Chemical Brothers; three weeks in a psychiatric clinic for depression; the death of a number of people close to her). The year before, the singer was arrested and cautioned for assault after kicking a photographer. There were protracted
online tiffs with singers Courtney Love, Azealia Banks, Cheryl Cole (‘your mother must be so proud, stupid b****’) and the late Peaches Geldof. She even took on the BNP, calling them ‘racist, homophobic Nazis’.
But Allen insists she has calmed down. ‘My husband has been very good with that,’ she says of her anger issues. ‘I come from quite a mad family – they’re very... expressive. And when I first got together with Sam I did used to have a f ****** awful temper. I would scream and smash s***. He just didn’t react. He’d shut down and walk away. So you realise pretty quickly that losing your temper isn’t going to work, it’s just a waste of energy.’
We pass the Shepherd’s Bush Empire venue, scene of her return to the musical fray this April – her ‘Mumback’, as Allen wittily had it – following a four-year retreat to the Cotswolds to ‘have kids and pick flowers’.
The show started a world tour in support of her 2014 Sheezus album that will run until New Year. ‘I listen to Sheezus now and it doesn’t feel like me,’ she puzzles. ‘It’s a hormonal, weird, pregnant angry lady.’
The song This Is The Life For Me found Lily sitting at home with an infant (‘No energy left in me, the baby might have taken it all’) while studying social media photos of her mates (‘Everyone looks so wasted’). Earlier this month, Allen appeared on the
Jonathan Ross Show, in which she tearfully relived losing her first child, a son who was stillborn at six months in 2010. Does she now regret having given the interview? ‘No, it was cathartic actually,’ she says.
Spend time with Allen and you will repeatedly hear references to her own failure and futility. Insecurity runs through her like a river. Significantly, she can’t remember much of her childhood. Pick out any of the 13 schools she attended, including private boarding establishments, and she struggles to recall them. Allen was four when her father Keith, then a promising comic actor, left her mother, older sister Sarah and younger brother Alfie. She remains in loose contact with her dad. There is a resigned affection when she mentions the troubled Welsh hell-raiser, notorious
I didn’t have a facts of life chat… I wasn’t even shown how to brush my teeth
more for his punchy booze binges and outlandish drug-fuelled behaviour than 35 years of decent acting – his early-Eighties work with The Comic Strip was redoubtable.
Her brother Alfie is now an acclaimed actor, in Game Of Thrones. ‘I know him so well,’ she says of her brother, ‘it always seems so false when he’s up on the screen. I just think, “Stop being [his character] Theon Greyjoy!’
Following the split, Allen’s mother, the film producer Alison Owen, remembers her second born as becoming ‘very caretakery’, when they lived in a council flat in central London. The family later lived with comedian Harry Enfield, who her mother was seeing.
Allen left school with no qualifications and felt ill-prepared for the future, having missed out on basics like personal hygiene and the facts of life.
‘We didn’t have “that chat”,’ she frowns. ‘In fact, there’s lots of chats that I didn’t have with them. It would have been weird if we’d just had “that chat” because I would have been thinking, “Well, maybe someone could have taught me how to brush my teeth too”.’
With her own children, Allen hopes to right the wrongs of her own upbringing. ‘I’m a firm and clear mother but not unnecessarily strict,’ she says. ‘You reinforce boundaries and give your kids a sense of stability. I want my kids to know where they are and know that they’re loved.’
Returning to her career, Allen says she wasn’t disappointed with Sheezus and its 60,000-plus sales in Britain, ‘because unless it sold 20 million copies it didn’t make a blind bit of difference to my bank account. That’s not where I make my money.’
Branding has become Allen’s main source of income: an association with Chanel, a Samsung deal – estimated to be worth about £1m – and endorsements such as Elegant Touch nail products and Cornetto ice cream. ‘I don’t know how much I earn,’ Allen shrugs, although she is estimated to be worth about £9m.
As we reach the Terminal 3 drop-off, Allen reveals that she has recently finished a song entitled You’re Mean To Me And You’re Not Even Fun – a jab, perhaps, at her legion of online haters? ‘I think people are jealous,’ she scoffs defiantly, shouldering her Chanel shopping bag. ‘I’m the poster girl for someone who has it all. I’m a mother, I’m in love, I’ve got a very happy marriage, a great job, I get paid lots of money, I fly around the world, I go to parties. ‘Plus,’ she adds, rummaging for her lighter. ‘I’ve got nannies who can look after my kids in the morning if I’ve got a hangover. Who wouldn’t be jealous of that? I have the perfect life.’