Lily thinks for a split-second, then rattles off an imaginary tabloid standfirst. “Pint-sized potty-mouthed pop diva, daughter of Keith Allen, who once said she would celebrate her number one single by taking cocaine…”
She could go on, perhaps throwing in lines about how she spent time at the Priory or that she sold Ecstasy in Ibiza when she was 15. It would amount to more of less the same thing; an amalgam of what she sees as tabloid contortion, the pushing of fact to extremes.
“I thought that if I was just honest and said, yeah, I’ve taken drugs and I have sex and give blowjobs and like a drink, then no one would be able to write ‘Lily Allen in Cocaine Shocker’… but they still manage to do it.
“Like, I always find it funny that people will come up to me on the street and say, ‘Oi! You’re that bird Lily Allen’,” she says, switching from her relatively well-spoken North London timbre to pitch-perfect rude girl, hand on hip, index waggling. She goes on. “‘Why d’you spit at dat Peaches, yeah? She seems like a nice girl…’”
Then she laughs and laughs, eyes clenched tight as she stresses in a slow, Bill Clinton-like tone that she did not spit at Peaches Geldof. It’s a bizarre denial to have to regularly make in public, but then in August the Daily Mirror alleged that she did just that. “I mean, I used to be quite an aggressive teenager and get into fights a lot,” she concedes. “So it’s weird for me now, because when I see someone looking at me, my first reaction is to go, What!? What you looking at? It still takes me ten seconds to remember… oh… I’m famous!”
What else, she ponders? Well, no one bothers to mention that the time she spent in the Priory three years ago had nothing to do with drink or drugs, but was to help deal with the depression she suffered following the break-up with her first boyfriend, Lester Lloyd. A little dramatic? Perhaps. But view the episode as a thwarted early bid for some stability, and maybe it’s understandable that the hurt of separation was all the more acute. They even shared a dog.
But no time for wallowing… what really annoys the hell out of Allen is that Lloyd recently sold the story of their relationship (or at least the “Ecstasy and cannabis-fuelled outdoor romp” bits) to the Sunday Mirror for, she claims, £25,000. “What an arsehole! He’s living off my money in a nice brownstone apartment in bloody New York. The advance I got for my album was £25,000, and that had to last me over two years!
“Obviously, my mum subsidised me quite a lot then. My parents are quite middle class, but my dad’s never given me any money. He’s a f*****. The first thing I had to do when I signed my deal was pay my mum thousands of pounds. She’d kept tabs on everything she’d given me!”
The thing is, there’s no point in telling Allen that she should put up with inconveniences like repaying family loans, tabloid intrusion or an unforgiving schedule because it all amounts to the price of fame. To her, being famous might be a laugh, but it’s not why she’s doing all of this. First and foremost, her career to date has been a smash-and-grab raid on the record buyer’s purse that will hopefully allow her to indulge in nothing more outrageous than a comfortable life with a husband, kids and the Sunday roasts she claims to be a dab hand at (“that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it?”).
“When I was really, really young, I visited my dad on a film set. We stayed in a trailer, and every morning someone would come and get him up and put him in a car so he could go off and do what he had to do. I remember thinking, that’s great, I want to be famous! You don’t have any responsibility to other people. But it’s funny, because really, I’ve craved responsibility from an early age.”
But, aside from being famous, there’s not a great deal else she can do right now. Her only qualification is in flower arranging, and she doesn’t fancy going back to that. “Yeah, I did this course in it before the music thing worked out. I ended up working in this florist’s for a few months,” she says with a self-conscious grin, although she’s still able to offer sound advice on the subject (“don’t mix country flowers with exotic foliage. It’s a common mistake that a lot of people make”). “It was nice for a while, but I couldn’t cope with getting up at 4am to buy stock and being told what to do.”
And although getting up early and being told what to do seem to have been a recurring theme on her promotional dash round North America, there is at least the projected album sales of 1.5 million to get her out of bed each morning. What she still can’t understand is why people in manufactured pop groups would go through all of this purely for “fame”. It’s too much hard work for no tangible end result, she reasons. Fortune over fame every time, thanks. “Plus they make you wear such terrible clothes in those bands.
“The most important thing for me is that I can buy my own house,” she says. “I want that more than anything in the world. Nothing grand, just something with a nice garden and a nice car in the drive.”
The next day, in her quest for simple, quiet domesticity, Lily Allen does the following: borrows $61,150-worth of Chanel jewellery for a photo shoot; drives down Sunset Boulevard in a convertible Ford Mustang while being pursued by the paparazzi; pole-dances for The Times; bursts into tears when her mum surprises her by flying out to LA before her show; has a giggling fit during one of her songs because a group of American fans at the front are singing along to every word; slags off her American label on stage for not releasing her album here sooner; chats with Orlando Bloom, Gwen Stefani and Sean Lennon after the show; talks a huge nightclub doorman into letting a dozen people into his club through the rear fire exit; dances, laughs, drinks and smokes until morning.
The only thing she doesn’t get to do is meet Lindsay Lohan, but it must have been a close-run thing – the rumour is that Lohan tried to get into the show, but was turned away because she didn’t have a ticket. Even in LA not just anybody, it seems, gets to rub shoulders with the UK’s biggest somebody.
Lily Allen’s album, Alright, Still, is out now on EMI. A single, Littlest Things, is out on December 11
