How Lily Allen found herself in the pink
Fame. Fortune. Love. She’s had it all, lost it all, and now? She’s making sense of it all in her most revealing interview yet…
Lily Allen is not a cartoon. Now, to be fair, she does look ever-so-slightly like she has rolled straight out of the pages of a Manga comic and onto the sofa opposite me in her North London studio. She has fluoro-pink hair and orange nails; big, wing-lined eyes on a teeny little face; sharp, pretty, forever-young features. But look beyond that. Because you need to know this – hell, she’s written a whole book trying to tell you this – Lily Allen is not a cartoon.
As the fresh smoke from her Marlboro cigarette twists into nothing above her, she admits that she’s scared. Outside, beyond the bunker of her cramped, eclectic, unremarkable little studio, it is late summer and she is still weeks away from the publication of her very revealing memoir, My Thoughts
Exactly. She knows better than anybody what’s coming once it goes on sale – that she has handed the tabloids and the trolls everything they’ve ever wanted. “I guess I am anxious about it,” she shrugs. “But I also think those people will always have an agenda.”
By the time you read this, the book will have been released and its juiciest bits shredded and splattered across the internet into a thousand different click-bait headlines. Still, should you have missed them, let’s revisit the highlights quickly.
Lily once had sex with Liam Gallagher. On a plane.
Lily has been a drug user since her teens. Cocaine. Weed. Ecstasy. Ketamine. Heroin… almost.
Lily cheated on her then-husband, Sam Cooper, repeatedly. With men and women. This involved female escorts who would arrive at her hotel rooms, bag of sex toys in hand.
Lily had a stalker. Lily had a breakdown. Lily had everything on a silver platter and still f*cked it up.
Yet there is enough pain, tragedy and general humanity in the book to add flesh and heart to the caricature of Lily Allen – the bolshie, bitchy, big-mouthed celebrity who exists only in the realm of Twitter spats and pap pictures of her stumbling out of The Groucho Club. That seems to have been the narrative since she started out more than a decade ago with her debut single, Smile. “For a good eight years of my life, you couldn’t read my name in the newspaper without it being prefaced with ‘potty-mouthed pop princess’,” she says.
But she is now 33: a mother, a songwriter, a businesswoman and a boss. And she has, by anyone’s standards, endured enough to qualify as a fully-fledged 3-D human. Nobody could underestimate what she’s been through.
“Well, you say that, but I do because for the last 10 years people have been telling me to shut up and not be such a drama queen. Like, ‘You don’t have a right to feel like that because you’ve got money and you’re successful.’”
But she’s not having that any more.
IN THE BEGINNING…
At the start, it was all OK. Well, it was and it wasn’t. It was a laugh, but the cracks that would later splinter and shatter were already there.
The daughter of actor Keith Allen and film producer Alison Owen, she had an unconventional childhood, and the first half of the book is full of the kind of anecdotes that make you wonder whether the authorities would have been asking questions, had they taken place on a Grimsby council estate rather than in wealthy, bohemian west London. Her dad was mainly absent, and when he wasn’t it was “cancellations, crap excuses and disappointments”, Lily remembers in the book. Her mum was often away, busy working, or taking drugs with a friend. Lily has recounted the number of times she was left waiting to be picked up from school.
And aged 18, two years before she even released her first single, Allen experienced her first stint in the
Priory. That was in 2004, thanks to depression and an overdose on paracetamol, by way of her first real heartbreak. That relationship was what she based Smile on. “I didn’t learn anything from it [rehab]. I’d hit rock bottom and my mum was like, ‘I’m sending you here.’ I got there and just focused on getting out. I wasn’t invested. I didn’t think I was going to get clean.”
THE FAME PHASE
Class-As are hardly an unusual part of celebrity life. But it’s depressing how quickly they became a necessary escape for Allen once fame truly hit. In 2006, Smile had gone to number one, and her debut album,
Alright, Still, gained critical acclaim. It’s since sold over two million copies.
She considers the person she was back then. “I think that she’d been screaming out for attention her whole life, and then she got it and she was overwhelmed by it all and didn’t know how to process it. And then she got a bit defensive…”
This new-wave ladette who was prone to a bitchy outburst quickly proved to be tabloid gold. She had it all, from the “pottymouthed pop princess” headlines to Julie Burchill’s put-down of “overprivileged cry-baby”.
“And then [I] really didn’t know how to process what was coming back…” she says.
It wasn’t just the snarky headlines and online attacks. This was a time – before the Leveson inquiry – when celebrities were followed day and night by braying paparazzi.
“…And so I started drinking and taking lots of drugs to deal with it.”
They wouldn’t leave her alone. “It was physically oppressive,” she recalls. “There were 20 to 30 men outside my flat every morning. I used to take pictures through my letterbox and send them to my lawyer.
“That felt like prison at times. And drugs and alcohol were definitely like, ‘This is too much, I need to escape.’”
Most of it would happen at her flat in Queen’s Park. Friends would visit, smoking and drinking and snorting into the early hours.
For a few years, her work kept it all on the right side of functioning. “I’ve always been good at keeping my appointments and not letting people down,” she says. “So we’d party, then if I had to be up at 7am for a flight, I’d knock myself out with sleeping pills at 2am to make sure I got in five hours’ sleep before I had to be up. I was never one of those people who stayed up for days on end.” Still, by 2009, things felt like they were going awry. From the outside, it looked rosy. Her second album, It’s Not
Me, It’s You, had debuted at number one in the UK and overseas. She went on to win three Ivor Novello songwriting awards for it. But the months were passing in a haze of drink and drugs. It’s also when the Liam Gallagher incident happened (both during and after an 11-hour flight to Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival).
Fame’s darker edges had started to warp other facets of her psyche.
She had never been a fan of her body. Remember her signature prom-dress-and-trainers look? It was crafted to hide the legs she didn’t like.
“I was gearing up to do promo for the second album,” she says. “That’s when I started not eating, when I started thinking about having to do photo shoots and red carpets. When I was feeling really bad, everything that I ate would come back up. If I wasn’t, it would be just lunch or dinner. Part of me getting ready for a show would be to vomit for 20 minutes. Then I’d clean up my face and start doing my hair and make-up. I just felt really fat and grotesque.”
THE SETTLED PHASE
But then a chink of light came along in the form of Sam Cooper. The press called him a builder and decorator but, in fact, he was a proper posh boy, privileged and running his own building company. Most importantly for Lily, he was straightforward, reliable and existed outside of the celebrity orbit. “I thought, ‘This is it. I’m going to get married, I’m going to live in the country and have babies.’”
He was the sort of stability she’d never known before. Nobody who had ever loved Allen had been the steady sort. Until Cooper.
She announced her retirement from the music industry. Although she admits, “I never really believed I was retiring. I thought if I said I was going away completely, they’d give me enough time to have babies in quiet.”
It should have been lovely. But sometimes life is an utter bastard. A year after Allen moved in with Cooper, their first child died; a boy, born three months too early with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The story of George Cooper’s birth and death as Lily documents it in her book is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read.
Eight months later, Allen and Cooper married. Their daughter, Ethel, was born not long after, suffering from complications that affected how she fed and breathed. Soon after, Allen discovered she was pregnant again and her youngest daughter, Marnie, was born in January 2013.
The greatest highs and the most unfathomable lows had been delivered in a breakneck three-year period. Reeling, she began writing the Sheezus album. Her choice to return to work was complex, she
“Fame sometimes felt like prison”
explains. Partly financial, partly because she realised she needed more than motherhood and quiet domesticity, and partly because she was still broken from everything.
THE CUTTINGLOOSE PHASE
“When Ethel was born and she had those complications, I was scared of making a connection because I knew what it was like to hold your dead child, so I was almost like, ‘I don’t want to become attached because it’s going to die and I can’t go through that again. I won’t survive it.’ So I put up a barrier.”
Allen embarked on a world tour alone to promote Sheezus, an album she didn’t even like. An album that received mixed reviews.
“Sheezus, Lily Allen, what the hell are you playing at?” one newspaper review read. Another called it “an outrageous delight”.
“I had always assumed I’d chuck my kid over my shoulder and take them around the world. But Sam didn’t want that. He didn’t think it was a stable environment for them.”
She resents that now. “I think it was quite selfish. He got to stay at home and have the family that I’d just spent three years making inside me. I had to go out and earn money and leave that family behind.
“If the kids had been there it would have created a more stable environment. When you wake up in a place where you don’t know anybody and you’ve got 16 hours to kill, you’ve only got a few options.”
One of those was to get drunk. The other was to live the full rock-androll cliché and make sex part of the equation too. She began cheating on Cooper. Some of those illicit dalliances were with professional women who she paid to turn up to her hotel room. As far as I can figure, this is the psychological context to her frenzied sexual renaissance. Firstly, she’d never had an orgasm before.
“I’d had sex but it wasn’t enjoyable sex,” she says. “It wasn’t horrible sex or abusive sex, but it was just lying there and taking it, for want of better words.” She couldn’t even make herself come. “I think sex is so much about connection, isn’t it? Both connecting with another person and connecting with yourself, and if you don’t have a sense of self, then what part of you is it that you’re trying to please? I just couldn’t find that part. I couldn’t get there. I didn’t know who that person was. So I’d just made peace with it.”
But then she read an article about cropped tops. She admits it sounds ridiculous, but she was 29 and it claimed it was unacceptable for anyone over 30 to wear one. “I’d been so pregnant since I was 25 and I was really looking forward to getting rid of the weight and wearing a cropped top. But then I read that and started to think that maybe [at 30] you’re past it. I felt like I hadn’t really done that stuff yet. So I felt like I had to cram it all into the last year of my twenties,” she laughs.
“QUICK!” she yells. “START COMING. WITH EVERYONE.” Did she question her sexuality? “I had this little voice in my head saying ‘maybe.’ The not-masturbating and not having the connection with anyone… maybe I was looking in the wrong places. But I didn’t feel attracted to women. I was just on a mission to find out what was going to wake something up in me, so I was trying everything out.”
I want to know more. But for someone who has spilled so much in a book, she starts to become dismissive of the questions. Of the prostitutes, she simply says, “I was just bored, lonely and incredibly depressed and the drugs weren’t working any more, alcohol wasn’t working any more… so I was like, ‘OK, let’s try this new thing.’” Nowadays the sex is great though. “Well, my boyfriend’s penis is lovely,” she chortles, referring to DJ Daniel London, her partner of almost three years, following her split with Sam. She concedes it’s down to “finding someone I feel relaxed with and can be myself with. I’m not trying to please him the whole time. I’m just in it.”
THE “BROKEN” PHASE
The years since Sheezus have hardly been quiet. Punctuating the stress of her divorce was the small matter of a stalker, Alex Gray, breaking into her home while she was in bed. London had to wrestle him out of the flat. He was eventually charged and detained indefinitely.
You may wonder how much more one person could take. Arguably the answer came in November 2016 when a row with Cooper over him embarking on a new relationship triggered a full-on psychotic episode.
“It was a build-up of everything and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she admits. It wasn’t the relationship per se. They’d long since split and Lily was already in love with Dan. It was his caginess, the perceived deceit, she couldn’t cope with. “When I feel that the people I trust most have betrayed that, my whole world falls out from underneath me.”
She spiralled into a violent rage, and was admitted to hospital, with staff threatening to section her.
“[The staff] had me pinned down on the floor. I picked up a water cooler and threw it through the window. Dan said six nurses tackled me to the floor and they had the needle out and were about to knock me out and sedate me. Once the
“I love my therapist more than anything”
needle goes in, you’re sectioned. [Dan] had to really fight with them not to do it,” she says.
She was on anti-psychotic drugs for a time. But her career, kids and Dan have got her through, longer term. At the moment she doesn’t feel the need for medication, though she was on antidepressants earlier this year. “I had a panic attack on a plane. The Trigger
Bang video had just come out and I was consumed with anxiety about entering the market again. I couldn’t breathe.”
She also has therapy once a week. “I love my therapist more than anything. I’m terrified of the day he’s going to die,” she laughs. “I’ve actually asked him, ‘Do you have an apprentice? If you get hit by a car, does someone else just sit there? And are they up-to-date on what’s going on with me?’”
THE MENDED (ISH) PHASE
As the interview draws to a close, she’s reflective, even sanguine, about her rocky road to the present: “I think I’ve had a unique set of circumstances. Substances and alcohol haven’t helped. Although maybe they have in a way. Maybe those things were always lying there underneath and if I hadn’t flirted with that stuff so much, maybe I wouldn’t have hit rock bottom so soon. Maybe I’d be there in five years’ time. Maybe it sped up the process.”
I like Lily Allen. I like that she can’t help saying certain things. I like that she genuinely thinks about the questions you’ve asked her and that if you interrupt her before she’s made her point, she’ll just keep talking to make sure you understand her.
As for the book… it deserves to be read. Not just because it’s a rollicking good romp, but because if you’re going to judge her then she deserves for you to take the time to read her full story.
Through all the drugs and sex and salacious, headline-stealing revelations, there is a central thread of the book, which is this likeable, flawed girlturned-woman searching for happiness in the wrong places. And losing it in the most devastating way possible. So there is only one question this can end on. Is she happy now?
She pauses. “Look, happiness for me is your first E at Glastonbury – that’s the happy place. I don’t think I’ve ever had that base level of happiness. What I see as being happy is that fake level of happiness because that’s what I’ve had from the spike in endorphins or whatever.” She stumbles again. “But I’m in a happy relationship, my kids are thriving and I’m creating great music. I couldn’t really ask for much more. So, yeah, I’m in a good place.”