Lily Allen: 'I'm not the show-off you think'

Lily Allen left it late, but in a year dominated by female artists, she's set to eclipse all her rivals. Catching up with her at home in west London, Miranda Sawyer talks drink, drugs and the pressures of fame, and why she's still Britain's sparkiest pop star

When I first interviewed Lily Allen, in May 2006, she cheered me right up. I'd become bored with pop musicians, especially young ones, until Lily bounced in, like Tigger in a tutu. Just 21, with a catchy, original songwriting voice, stroppy opinions and insouciant style, she was a bright and sparkly, brand new, self-made, proper pop star.

Self-made, despite her strange, celeb-studded upbringing. Is there anyone out there who doesn't know that Lily's dad is Keith Allen? That her godfather was Joe Strummer? That she was a member of the Groucho Club at the age of 17? They didn't when she started. Faced with corporate indifference to her reggaeish tunes, Lily launched her music through her MySpace page. She had thousands of fans before any grown-ups cottoned on. In OMM's case, it was our work experience girl who alerted us to Lily. When we told her record company we wanted to put her on our cover, they didn't know who she was.

Still, once Ms Allen was out there, it was as though she snapped her fingers and the whole world fell in love with her. After that, well... Over the past two and a half years, Lily has changed. Not so much in herself - today, drinking tea, shouting at her dog, she's just as funny as ever, though distinctly more glamorous - but in how she's seen by the rest of us. Her public persona has shifted from fresh to ubiquitous, from cheeky to cocky, from underground sensation to gossip-column regular. More, from being one star in a pop firmament of two - the other being Amy Winehouse - Lily has been swiftly followed by other young female artists: Kate Nash, Adele, Laura Marling, Duffy, with others to come next year, like Little Boots and La Roux.

All this means that, although we haven't really spoken since our first chat, it feels as though I've been living in Lily World. I know everything she has been up to. Playing the main stage at Glastonbury, splitting up with a Chemical Brother, exchanging insults with Elton John at one awards ceremony, being carried out of another, hosting a chatshow, launching a clothing line, having online confidence crises, having a miscarriage: everything in her recent life appears to have been publicly aired, discussed, picked over. Even for a natural show-off, that must be very strange.

'Yeah, well, I'm not as much of a show-off as you might think,' says Lily. 'The other day, I was DJing, and they wanted to announce that I was coming on. I was like "Noooo!" Even when I'm playing live, I won't let anyone introduce me. I just appear. Because it's my biggest fear. Someone walking out on stage, saying "Ladies and gentlemen, Lily Allen." And then, "Boooooooo!"'

Lily bursts out laughing and has a drag on her cigarette. We are sitting at the kitchen table in her new flat. She bought it in 2007, but it's taken a year for it to be done up. 'Would you like a tour?' Yes please. Off she goes, giving it Hello! around the vast kitchen/sitting room, waving a hand at her Mexican religious paintings, her dog Mabel and a just-bought tray - £5 from a car boot sale - that matches the coffee table.

The bedroom, painted dark blue, comes complete with a very en suite bath (it's actually in the room) and knickers strewn decoratively across the floor. There's a painting by the Clash's Paul Simonon on one wall; a print that Lily bought from the Zoo art fair on another. The spare bedroom contains her DJ decks, both vinyl and CD. One bathroom displays a photograph of her playing her first proper gig, at Bush Hall in west London in July 2006. And she has a dressing room, packed to the ceiling with multi-hued clothes and mad footwear, all crammed together higgledy-piggledy and accessed via a wobbly old decorating ladder.

She shows me a pair of ludicrous shoes with flickering lights in the heels, a designer version of the flashing trainers worn by little kids. I'm also amazed by some oil-slick black skyscrapers, a bizarre mix of stilettos and wedges that make tiny Lily tower over me. 'Oh yeah, I've worn them to clubs,' she says, teetering back into the kitchen to make another pot of tea. 'They're funny, aren't they?'

In her heels and black lace dress, with black kohl swoops flipping out from her eyes, Lily looks like a cartoon. Which is perhaps what she is these days.

'I've become a character in a comic,' she agrees. 'That's what it feels like. And that character is always drunk! I wish my comic character wasn't that, but there's nothing can I do.'

Actually, she has been off the booze for a few weeks: 'since 22 September,' she proudly informs, though she knows that no one believes she's ever sober. Now, when she's out at parties and has her photograph taken, she tries hard not to blink, so that the papers can't get a picture of her with eyes half-closed, appearing out of it. 'Instead, I look like a rabbit in the headlights,' she laughs. 'Like, what just jumped out in front of her? But I'm just trying not to look pissed!'

Oh, the irony. One of the first songs Lily wrote for her new LP is called 'Everyone's at It'. It's about taking drugs, recreational and prescriptive, and contains the lyric, 'I'm not trying to say that I'm smelling of roses/ But when will we tire of putting shit up our noses?'.

Who's 'we'?

'You mean, "How can she write a song about drugs when she's been so open about doing them before?" I'm just covering my arse with that lyric! No, with that song, I'm not trying to change anything. Drugs are illegal and bad and they ruin people's lives but they're pretty prominent. I have no intention of taking drugs again at the moment. But I can't say "Never again", because I don't know where I'll be in 10 years' time. And I will definitely drink in the future, just not for a while.'

With her current sobriety, Lily's staying in a lot more at the weekends. Going out has temporarily lost its appeal.

'A lot of people I know are drug addicts,' she announces. 'So they're not much fun, because they'll just talk at you very loudly about things you don't feel nearly as passionately about. Also, if you're sober then people feel like they have something to prove, they say things like, "That's great, I mean, obviously, I haven't got a problem, but it's great..."

'There's a lot of self-delusion. I was in the toilet, a long time ago, with this person when they said, "I've been clean for nearly 10 years." And I'm like, "What do you think we're doing here?"'

As you can see, at 23, Lily still seems incapable of self-censorship, though she insists she's more careful than when she started. Everything she says, whether out loud or on her blog, is immediately reported and repeated across the world. She jokes that she's going to get a tattoo on her left wrist that says SHUT UP, so that, when she starts drinking again, if she waves her arms around, she'll see it and - she hopes - take the advice. 'I find it hard to measure these things,' she says. 'How much to say, how much to keep in.'

For a while, she vented on her (very funny) blog, but she does so less these days. 'No matter how mundane a thing I write there, it's news. That's depressing. I wish I could spout off like I used to without being made to look like an idiot. I'm not writing to the press, I'm writing to my fans, but I've had to change the way I phrase things, I have to be careful.'

Her most notorious blogging mistake was in May 2007, when, lonely in America, she wrote a sad little missive calling herself 'fat, ugly and shitter than Winehouse'. She had thousands of supportive replies, but won't be doing that again.

'There's not much you can say about it, except it was difficult,' she says now. 'I'd never been in a situation where I had to be photographed, for work, and then also when I didn't want to be photographed as well. My mum always told me, "You're beautiful, you're my beautiful little girl," and then suddenly I wasn't. I read all the stuff that people were writing about me and I started to get a different view. I mean, I never thought I was a supermodel or anything, but I didn't think I was quite as unattractive as people were saying!

'And there were a lot of people that weren't particularly attractive, but who didn't get flak like me, and what I could see was that those people were thin. So I just thought, "Maybe if I'm not fat, then people won't call me ugly." I felt two ways about it. I felt like I don't want to have to change myself to make myself feel better, but also I'm being told over and over again that I'm horrible. There were times when I was so depressed and sad that I couldn't take any more of it, and... yeah.' She trails off, then perks up again. 'Still, that bad feeling only lasts for a couple of hours. Usually.'

She's more complicated than she seems, Lily. Her demeanour is that of the most confident girl in the world - insolent eyes, relaxed body language, quick laughter - and she's certainly mature for her age; yet, if you listen to what she's saying, she can sound sad. One minute, she's rebellious, the next, resigned; attention-seeking, then pulling back. You can see it in the titles she went through for her new album. She was going to call it Stuck on the Naughty Step, but has decided on the more defiant It's Not Me, It's You

Unlike Alright, Still, which had a variety of producers, this time round she's worked exclusively with the LA-based Greg Kurstin, who has also produced Kylie and Peaches. Their first working session, in the Cotswolds, lasting all of one and a half weeks, resulted in five new songs. The record company got very excited, and the album release date was scheduled. But then Lily found she couldn't write any more. Too much pressure. It took a few weeks to get her confidence back.

I make her go through It's Not Me... track by track, until she protests. 'It makes the whole thing seem really serious and important! Which is not how I think about my songs.' In fact, she jokes, she's only in it for the money. 'Someone said, "Would you like 100 grand? You just have to make another album..."' This is a smokescreen. She's excited about the LP, and looking forward to playing the songs live. But she's also scared, so she makes it sound less important to her than it is.

Plus, now she knows what it's like to be in the media glare, Lily genuinely wonders if making music is worth the hassle. 'Sometimes I feel like I really have had enough. And I'm not someone who eats, lives and breathes music; I don't love it enough to keep getting all this.'

And, no, she's not going into acting; nor will she be taking up BBC3's offer of another chatshow, at least not in the near future. Instead, she's thinking long-term and is setting up her own business. She won't tell me what in, but I wonder if it has anything to do with her work for London mayor Boris Johnson. In July, via her blog, she offered to help him solve knife crime ('Boris, if you're listening, call me, man': Boris, who understands the power of celebrity endorsement, promptly did.) She gets very fired up when going over her ideas.

Why would you succeed where others have failed? You're not a politician.

'I know, but that's good. From what I can see, there's lots of money waiting to be spent, it's just about finding the right thing that will really make a difference. I'm not going to rush it, I want to give all my time to this. We're trying to figure out a scheme that I can attach myself to.'

Such as?

'Well, with knife crime, I don't think it's fuelled by hate, but by wanting to get a reaction or some respect from your community. So we're working on a reward scheme, or almost a sports day: a way you can win something for your community, like bike parks or computers or sewing machines. Anything really, so you get the kudos from your peers for positive action, for winning stuff.'

Hmmm. You don't want to dampen her enthusiasm, but sewing machines?

Maybe politics isn't Lily's natural arena. For the moment, anyhow, she is still a working pop star. So let's discuss that LP. Though she has said she wants it to be seen as more a body of work than Alright, Still, it is still very varied, musically, urban beats rubbing up against Carpenters tunes, French accordion followed by Madness jollity. Her song topics are both more personal this time round, and less. There are three direct, sentimental songs about family members (her older sister, her mum and her dad) and four direct, unsentimental songs about men. There are also tracks, such as 'Everyone's at It', with wider topics. 'Fuck You' is a nursery rhyme that started out as an attack on the BNP and ended up being about George Bush. 'Him' is about God, and includes her favourite line on the record: 'Do you think He's ever been suicidal?/ His favourite band is Creedence Clearwater Revival'; '22' considers what it's like getting older when you're a woman. It describes a female character who's all washed up at 30, which could make me, and other more elderly listeners, depressed.


This raises the question, who is the lazy lover in 'Not Fair'? Sample lyric: 'I'm lying in the wet patch in the middle of the bed/I'm feeling pretty damn hard done by, I spent ages giving head.' Does the person in question know it's about him?

'The person in question,' says naughty Lily, 'is far too arrogant to even consider that it might be about him. It would not even cross his mind for a second. He's heard it, I've played it to him. And he had no idea. Didn't even ask.'

Like its predecessor, It's Not Me is packed with singles. 'Who'd of Known', in particular, mostly because it's a rip-off of Take That's 'Shine'.

'I know!' laughs Lily. 'But I didn't know when we wrote it. Greg just played the chords and I sang and we were like, "That's great, really hooky." Then when we played it back to someone, they pointed it out that it was, essentially, "Shine".' So Lily asked Take That to sing on it - 'I was looking forward to doing a video with them, me and Mark Owen holding hands.' They said no, but that Lily could use the tune because they really liked the song.

'The Fear' is the first single, inspired by 'one of those days when you just shout at the telly, "This is wrong!"' Lily's fear is 'of the world becoming this horrible sterile place. Being scared that there's never going to be anything real any more that isn't sponsored.' She's aware that she can talk, signed to contracts, as she is, that mean she has her picture on a credit card for students, or is the face of BBC3. In her defence, she waves papers at me: her daily schedule for the next four months.

'It's all there,' she cries, 'every day, every day, and I'm not even going to look at March. And then it gets to March and I suddenly see, "Oh, tomorrow I've got to do a signing in Starbucks." And it's too late for me to go, "Wait a minute, I don't like Starbucks!" Maybe I should have somebody looking at those things, but I'm just trying to get on with life and then it bites me on the bum.'

Why doesn't her management stop such marketing events, if she doesn't like them, I wonder. But then she tells me about her paparazzi situation and I stop wondering. There are around a dozen photographers who rock up to Lily's house every morning, and follow her everywhere: the only way she can give them the slip is if she leaves the house before 9am. She's got a dog, but she employs a dog-walker because she can't face the hassle; when invited by her friend and Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac to go for a run in the park, she refuses; she partly blames the photographers' constant presence for her current lack of love life.

'I've had a couple of times,' she says, 'when I've got to know someone over a few weeks and we've had a really great time here, just watching TV and shagging. And then I get paranoid because I get like, "I don't want to leave the house with you, because I don't want us to be photographed together and for us to suddenly have to justify our relationship, when we don't know what it is yet."

'And if I meet someone who's not part of the showbiz industry, I think, "Should I sleep with this person? Are they going to walk out of here and be straight on their phone?" Or you feel, "Oh, it's gone naff," because they're secretly enjoying having their photo taken. I guess that's why people go out with famous people, but there aren't really any that I fancy. I like,' announces Lily, 'much older men.'

One of these older men was Ed Simons, one half of the Chemical Brothers (he's 38). Lily and he had a serious, though on-off, relationship which finally broke up after she miscarried their baby at the beginning of this year. I do the proper journo thing, and ask about the miscarriage. But here, at least, her shutters come down. 'I'm not talking about that,' she says, though she has said publicly that she went to therapy about it. 'I have a brilliant therapist who I see once a week,' is all she will offer today.

As we chat, I change my mind about Lily. She's still her cheerful self - most of her sentences are punctuated with laughter - but, unlike when I met her before, there's a small feeling of loneliness in there. Maybe it's because she no longer lives with her mum and brother. Anyway, on several occasions, I feel protective of her, whereas before, her anecdotes just made me laugh.

She tells me about a pap who nearly ran her over, and then, when she protested, called her a slag and told her to get the fuck away from his car. Which was, as she pointed out, outrageous, as he followed her everywhere. She says the pap told her he would make her life 'a living hell'. One of his compadres was taking pictures of Lily's reaction. They were in the papers the next day.

Lily says she has had her car window smashed by a photographer backing into it. She's regularly called filthy names. But she can't sue them all because it's too expensive (about £25,000 every time) and pointless (if one pap is removed, the agency just sends another). And because her record company and manager advise her against it. 'If I tried to sue the News of the World, then my manager would have to be a witness. But he manages James Blunt as well, and what if he's got an LP coming out? Or the record company might have to promote Kylie's album...'

This seems utterly lame. It's not a pretty sight, a lone young woman being stalked by a pack of older men, all desperate for her to compromise herself so they can earn more. But hey, that's the fame game these days. New technology launched Lily; and it's why we see so much of her today. All her Facebook and MySpace frippery leads to a constant drip of trivia to the press, which is then backed up with streams of pictures. There are far more paparazzi in London than there used to be because anyone can use a digital camera and most publications will buy the results. And that's before we consider the amateur mobile phone video. That never-ending Lily (or Amy/Agyness/Kate) buzzing in our heads is caused almost entirely by modern communication methods.

Also, there is a part of Lily that enjoys the attention. If she's drunk, she'll have a laugh with the paps - there's a YouTube video that shows her chatting to them outside the Groucho, getting a light and announcing: 'I'm so happy at the moment.' In the first article I wrote about her, she slated Posh Spice for checking her reflection before facing photographers outside a restaurant. 'And I do that now!' she admits cheerfully. 'Why wouldn't you make sure you look nice before they take your photograph?'

So, it's ridiculous to make this a poor Lily article, when we're sitting in her lovely flat, talking about her new album, her new life. She's remembering a disastrous day when she tried to write music with Damon Albarn. She told him that she liked to work with loops and samples, but he just bashed away at the piano, saying, over and over, "Got anything yet?" Lily hadn't. And then, when she stood up to go, two of her shirt buttons popped off, exposing her bra-less chest. 'I am,' laughs Lily, 'sooo coool.' The same, but different. I ask Lily what was her highlight of the past two years. 'Glastonbury,' is her answer, meaning when she played the main stage in 2007. 'All my family were there, my mum and my dad and the baby. And I've been on that main stage since I was born, watching New Order and Joe [Strummer], and standing in front of it watching Oasis, who were my favourite band. So to play it was such a moving, brilliant experience...'

I saw that gig. She was great, the crowd loved her. There's no reason to worry about Lily, I think. She does her own thing, and, despite how the press reacts, lots of people like it. She's alright, still.

'The Fear' is released by Regal on 26 January, with 'It's Not Me, It's You' to follow in February