Lily Allen was U.S. hit before her CD was out
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, March 22, 2007
This is how you know you’re hot: Numerous American critics put you on their 2006 year-end best-of lists even though your album didn’t come out until Jan. 30, 2007.
Which is what happened to 21-year-old British singer Lily Allen, whose “Alright, Still” arrived here six months after its release at home. Apparently, nobody wanted to miss this elevator while it was still on the ground floor. Blender magazine pre-canonized Allen as “The Number One Reason to Love ‘07,” while GQ crowned her “the first lady of MySpace.”
The latter is a big part of the story. Allen set up her own MySpace page in late 2005, while her label was still trying to figure out what to do with her. She posted demos of her own songs, fans responded and escalating viral buzz turned Allen into the “it” girl for social networking alterna-systems, evidenced by millions of downloads and her thousands of MySpace cyber friends.
Allen performs Monday in a sold-out show in Seattle.
Allen is not the first Internet-fueled pop phenom, but such broadband-speed success stories are still rare. She’s a streetwise songwriter, able to capture the vagaries of youthful romance and daily life in smartly observed reggae- and ska-infused pop songs that tend to be bright on the surface but decidedly darker at their centers.
That’s especially true of Allen’s breakthrough single, “Smile,” built on a sunny sample from the Soul Brothers’ ’60s classic “Free Soul” that masks the venom of lyrics evoking a cheated-on girl’s joy at the misery she visits on her former boyfriend. The Sophie Muller-directed video documents Allen’s revenge: She hires thugs to beat up her DJ-ex, then trash his apartment and scratch his vinyl records while she’s consoling him in a coffee shop – where she puts laxative in his coffee.
(Allen’s inspiration, DJ Lester Lloyd, may have gotten the last laugh: When the single hit No. 1, he sold the story of their romance to the British tabloids -for about the same amount of money Allen got as an album advance.)
“Smile” is not the only pistol in Allen’s bandoleer. “Not Big” belittles an unnamed ex who can’t deliver in bed. “Knock ‘Em Out” serves up pithy ripostes against unwanted attention from clueless men. Even the album’s one fairly traditional love song, “Littlest Things,” is sung over the piano break from a theme to the soft-core “Emmanuelle” films.
The album is Girl Power 2.0, though Allen suggests it’s at least partly a facade.
“I’m quite a self-conscious person and lack self-esteem in a lot of ways,” Allen said last fall, “so my way of dealing with that is to be quite sharp and pretend to people that I’m really confident and can handle myself. I think that’s deflected a lot of attention from the real me, and I think that really comes across in my music.”
As the British tabloids and music media have enjoyed trumpeting, Allen was a handful growing up in West London, one of three children of comedian-actor Keith Allen and Alison Owen, an Oscar-nominated film producer (for 1998’s “Elizabeth”). Her parents separated when Lily was 4, and she grew up with, and still lives with, her mother. She attended more than a dozen schools, most quite exclusive and several of which she was expelled from.
In 2002, Allen had a record deal that fizzled, so she worked briefly as a florist before hooking up with production team Future Cut (Darren Lewis and Tunde Babalola), which had made a name for itself in drum ‘n’ bass in the late ’90s. The team did the beats, Allen the lyrics and melodies, building on the reggae-punk-ska-pop-calypso neighborhood sound she’d grown up with.
Their first song: “Smile.” Another early track, “LDN” (text-message shorthand for London), used a sunny, calypso-tinged melody to underscore Allen’s ambivalence about her hometown. “Sun is in the sky/ oh, why, oh, why would I want to be anywhere else,” she sings. “Everything seems nice/ But if you look twice/ You can see it’s all lies.”
In September 2005, Allen signed with Regal, which wanted her to work with more established writers and producers. Instead, Allen uploaded her songs on MySpace. By last April, the previously unknown Allen had 40,000 cyber pals, a million downloads and the begrudging OK from her label to do it her way.
With the album slated for release in England in July, Allen played her first live date in May at a small London club. “We had an ad on MySpace, and 1,000 people showed up at a 200-seat club – it was definitely quite a special way of doing it,” she said. “And people knew all the lyrics before that!”
Lily Allen performs Monday in Seattle.
