Lily Allen stalks up and down the wide Roundhouse stage, rocking some lemon yellow palazzo pants and a sparkly top, giggling a little nervously, despite her years in show business. It’s near the end of the first night of her two-gig stint at this fabled venue, supporting her latest album, No Shame, and its very, very long press release, My Thoughts Exactly: a jaw-dropping memoir that deserves bestseller status.
Allen exudes a kind of relaxed relief; it’s all going rather well. Her two young daughters are approximately “nought-point-five miles down the road” – an important hand-hold for this singer whose relationship with motherhood is one of the rollercoaster themes of both book and album. It’s easy to forget, in all the furore that surrounds Allen’s public persona, that she is, in her own way, a grand dame of London pop, and even a good fit for its most recent, Caribbean-derived soundscapes.
It is so easy to lose sight of Allen as a music person – a savvy sound stylist who authors lyrics and melodies, who, in the video for her 2006 breakout track, LDN, sashayed into a hip west London record shop and mischievously asked the men behind the counter for a series of obscure-to-nonexistent genres of music, before flouncing out again.
For the first song of the encore, Allen has unexpectedly brought out pioneering junglist Shy FX for an energising blaze through their recent collaboration, Roll the Dice. Trading off with Stamina MC, Allen’s flirty guest feature is on point: her sweet but knowing west London coo – audibly forged out of London’s musical melting pot, and so often paired with her own reggae-derived beats – also went well with Stormzy’s Cigarettes and Cush in 2017.
Another of tonight’s standout tracks, meanwhile, is Knock ’Em Out, from Allen’s debut album, 2006’s Alright, Still. Its kiss-off to unwanted advances is evergreen (“not in a million years!”); but its Notting Hill Carnival clatter also seems to have had a nice update, an Afrobeats mix that lands Allen squarely in 2018.
Rightly, the blaring Jamaican pop fanfare of LDN is one of the biggest singalongs of the night. No Shame, meanwhile, is a surprisingly strong album whose songs are received warmly by a partisan crowd who cheer Allen until she chokes up, not once but twice. Some real horns, not canned, would have been nice; some real backing vocalists, not canned, too… but you realise the budget probably stretches only so far.
The No Shame songs offer up tear-jerking self-knowledge on the one hand, and some resonant productions on the other. As Allen tells it, My One is “about flying around the world having sex with lots of people”. The song’s blithe spaciousness resonates, even live. Allen’s vocals are heavily processed, but appositely so. She credits Mark Ronson, and Ezra Koenig, once of Vampire Weekend and latterly of Beyoncé’s Lemonade.
Allen also knows a thing or two about lemons. At the opposite end of the glamour spectrum is another recent song, Three, written from the point of view of a small child whose parent is leaving, and Apples, one of No Shame’s most stark and revelatory moments. Just Allen’s vocal and a little guitar from one of the two multi-instrumentalists, this is a long apology to Allen’s former husband, Sam Cooper, for all the terrible things she did. “I’m just like my mummy and daddy,” Allen sings, “I guess that apple doesn’t fall from the tree.”
If you haven’t read the book – or indeed, lived through the whole sorry saga by other means – Allen’s dad, Keith (you may know him as a comedian and actor), and mother, Alison Owen (a film producer), were, to varying degrees, dysfunctional absentee parents with big partying habits. (Side note: by contrast, Harry Enfield, for a time Allen’s stepfather, and who based his character Kevin the Teenager on Allen and her siblings, was rock solid.)
Even though Allen grew up scarred by her parents’ failings – attention-seeking, lacking in GCSEs, prone to chemical amusements herself – she went on to revisit the sins of the fathers and mothers, blow for blow, on her own children. She left domesticity with mixed feelings to tour her third album, Sheezus, in what became a fug of drink, drugs, infidelity and hookers. Marriage and motherhood had, supposedly, put paid to all that. All shades of hell ensued: divorce, a psychotic episode.
There is a queasy kind of reckoning in Allen’s very public personal life, between pain dished out and pain received; it is no little feat that she manages to alchemise all this into cogent, enduring pop.
She might have been a “bad mother” and a “bad wife” – “you saw it on the socials, you read it online”, as her opener, Come On, goes – but whatever her failings in those departments, Allen has undeniably been through a particularly torturous wringer at the hands of fame, of paparazzi, of bad men (she accuses a record executive of rape) and the tabloids. She has emerged contrite, more educated and more politicised.
The night’s closing oldie, Fuck You, is addressed to rightwing politicians close to home and farther away, in Hungary and Brazil; she changes the lyrics to include: “I wanna stay in the European Union!” None of this is preachy or over-dramatic, but as playful, tuneful and digestible as her kitchen sink songs about oral sex or falling in love.
In her book, the teenage Allen briefly encounters TV-presenter-cum-party-girl Paula Yates: it’s not too far-fetched to imagine Allen’s own story following those of Yates or Amy Winehouse.
Also, because Lily Allen was Lily Allen – problematic, demanding – she also faced a battle to be taken seriously by the justice system after a stalker threatened her life.
All seems well now, at this gig; but you can’t help thinking that, somewhere at the back of Allen’s mind, she can enjoy this homecoming show in some great part because her stalker remains safely sectioned. At a concert in January 2009 – around the time of The Fear, the chart-topping single from her second album, It’s Not Me, It’s You – the man who had stalked Allen online, and later confronted her in her own home in the middle of the night, turned up just down the road from here at a venue called Koko, with a threatening banner. As Allen tells it in My Thoughts Exactly, she nipped backstage to get her people to call the police, came back on, and got on with the business of being a pop star, terrified. I reviewed that gig, and noticed nothing amiss; reading about it made me quail, not so much from the frisson of proximity, but Allen’s subsequent struggle to get someone to do something about it.
It’s a small miracle that Allen can stand there at all, much less hold a tune.
