In case you haven’t been monitoring the zeitgeist recently, Lily Allen is the sharp, sassy, 21-year-old daughter of UK comedian Keith Allen, who’s recently become known as the poster-girl for the MySpace generation.
Her estranged father was responsible (alongside artist Damien Hirst and Blur’s Alex James) for Fat Les, the novelty band that provided the England football squad’s official anthem for Euro 2000 with the truly woeful ‘Vindaloo’. Not exactly the kind of pop pedigree you’d be proud of – and indeed, young Lily isn’t, judging by the recent Sunday Times interview where she described her dad’s brief foray into music as “shit”.
Whatever about her father, she actually comes across more like Mike Skinner’s younger sister. Certainly, she seems to have the street-smarts and DIY attitude. Although she was signed to Regal Records (a division of Parlophone/EMI) last year, she refused to bend to record company pressure to record her album in a “hit factory”. Instead she cheekily uploaded her tracks to her MySpace website, where she quickly amassed quite a following (more than 2.5 million hits to date). Pretty soon her rough demos were being championed by the likes of BBC Radio One’s Jo Whiley, and the NME and Observer Music Monthly were doing glowing features before she’d even released anything.
As things stand, much of this album will already be familiar to her MySpace “friends”, albeit in rougher, less produced versions. Not being one of them, this writer came to her sound fresh, suspecting the worst, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that there’s a lot more to Lily Allen than just a flukey internet phenomenon.
The girl can sing and, although she’s had a little help with some of the lyrics, she can also write. Mostly her lyrical themes detail the everyday concerns of your (above) average London girl – boys, bitches, clubs, magazines, soap operas, parents, mobile phones etc.
Musically she flirts with pop, ska, funk, rock and reggae, and with more catchy hooks on offer than a clearance sale in an angling shop, almost every track here could be released as a single.
It opens with ‘Smile’: “When you first left me I was wanting more/But you were fucking the girl next door/Whatcha do that for?” You simply couldn’t imagine one of Louis Walsh’s Stepford singers coming out with a lyric like that. Ever.
Next up is ‘Knock ‘Em Out’. Fairly representative of the album as a whole, this one deserves a lengthier quote: “Cut to the pub on a lads night out/Man at the bar ‘cos it was his shout/Clocks this bird and she looks okay/Caught him looking and she walks his way/‘Alright darlin’, you gonna buy us a drink then?’/‘Err no, but I was thinking of buying one for your friend’/She’s got no taste, hand on his waist/Tries to pull away but her lips on his face/‘If you insist, I’ll have a white wine spritzer’/‘Sorry love, but you ain’t a pretty picture.’"
Pretty soon she’s rhyming ‘Tesco’ with ‘al fresco’, and also swearing quite frequently. You get the impression that the lyrics were written into a scraggy-looking copybook with love hearts drawn all over the front. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. My favourite couplet of all comes in the politically incorrect clubbing song ‘Friday Night’: “It’s a quarter to and we get to the front/Girl on a guest-list dressed like a cunt.”
In lesser hands (or vocal chords), this record would quite simply be laughable. Instead though, you find yourself laughing along with her. It’s a commercially driven album, choc-a-bloc with feelgood rhythms and fuck-you rhymes, with enough musical chops and changes to keep you coming back for one more listen.
A coolly subversive Noughties Spice Girl (with a lot of added spice), Lily Allen might well be the saviour of contemporary British pop music. Alternatively, in this faddish web-world, she could just as easily be forgotten by this time next year.
Whatever happens in the future, the sound of the summer of 2006 most definitely belongs to her.
Illustration: Jon Berkeley