From the GQ archive: A No.1 album, a sellout tour and the most positive reviews of her career - pop's sharp-tongued sensation beat the backlash to enjoy her best year yet. GQ goes 'top bunk' on the road with the singer and quizzes her on surviving therapy, scaring men and, er, capital cities...
A squally Salt Lake City afternoon, the streets gaping and desolate, the sky glowering. Where better to seek sanctuary than inside the Mormon Tabernacle, on Temple Square, spiritual epicentre of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? At maximum capacity this vast domed building holds 8,000 worshippers, including 360 members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but this evening it's empty save for two banks of sound-checking bell ringers and a handful of onlookers, including a celebrated secular singer making her first visit to the city.
Lily Allen and I took a tram here from outside the sprawling Gateway Mall, where we picked at calorific salads in an Applebee's restaurant. In the manner of clueless tourists everywhere, we plotted a course with our fingers on the track-side map, fiddled about with the ticket machine, dithered over which stop to get off at, and annoyed regular commuters by flagrantly enjoying ourselves en route.
And now here we are, facing the pipes of the Tabernacle's impressive organ. She's being semi-respectful - there's been giggling, but nothing that might attract omnipotent wrath - and yet still Lily cuts an unlikely figure alongside the lizardly old men in dark suits, the plump matrons, their frill-collared blouses buttoned up to their chins, and the Sunday-best kids.
Lily is wearing ripped jeans, Air Jordans and a blue sweatshirt decorated with a Keith Haring print of the same barking dog she has tattooed on her wrist, alongside Homer Simpson, a smiley face and sundry other glyphs. Her hair is dark, bobbed. Earlier this afternoon, as we'd shared a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc amid the leopard-print upholstery of her dressing room, I watched her paint her fingernails black. Now I'm watching her tweet.
At each stop since her tour started in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, Lily has organised scavenger hunts, hiding tickets to her shows around the cities she visits, then sending out clues to their locations from her BlackBerry. We started with three pairs of tickets for tonight's show. One has already gone. "Its raining outside so this clue is generic, they're in applebees with a guy that's called erick," read Lily's tweet. I timed the response. It took less than two minutes for a sandy-haired boy to burst through the door of the restaurant, march up to the bar and demand to see Erick, a waiter, who handed over the tickets.
The Tabernacle tweet is: "I'm at c22 upon temple square, I've just found jesus come join if you dare." Sure enough, moments later three people in their early twenties, two skinny men and a larger girl, rush past us and start desperately searching along pew C22, under which Lily has surreptitiously taped an envelope holding the tickets. When she finds it, the girl gives a little leap of delight and spins around, spotting Lily. She approaches, tremulous and intense. "Are you Mormons?" wonders Lily, in a whisper. They're not.
Perhaps as a result, they're thrilled to meet her. Outside the Tabernacle, I take photos of the lucky trio with their heroine.
Earlier, Lily had asked me if I was surprised that, three years after I first interviewed her, shortly before her first album was released, she'd reached the point where even in this small city - population 180,000 - so far from home, her popularity has reached the point that she can send out a message on the internet giving a clue to her whereabouts and within moments people will gather, jumping for joy at being in her presence. I'd said that I wasn't, really. Not that I have special powers of prediction, but from the moment she materialised there was something about Lily that made one believe she was going to be a success. Lily Allen is just a brilliant pop star.
In the period since that first meeting, I've interviewed Lily a couple of times and we've enjoyed a few late nights and early mornings, and one or two more civilised occasions. We've spilt drinks on each other. I've stood on the train of her dress. She's dandled my goddaughter on her knee. I've answered her door to a cake-delivery man. She's sent me photos of a lion she encountered in Botswana. I've stumbled through the digi-flashes between Groucho door and limo seat. She's cooked me lunch. I've bought her tea.
We've been Range-Rover shopping together.
All of which is a way of saying that I like Lily very much.
She's smart beyond her years, funny enough to make an e-mail exchange a tortuous exercise in strained wit (on my end; her aperçus seem effortless), interested in the world, in books and politics and films and football and fashion and food and all the other good stuff. And, as the line from Shameless goes, she knows how to have a party.
She's also a human being: needy sometimes, narky occasionally, a handful certainly. She has one of the most mischievous cackles I've ever come across, tip of tongue sandwiched between teeth, and the biggest, brownest eyes outside an Andrex commercial.
Her story is well known: the once wayward daughter of actor Keith Allen and film producer Alison Owen, at just 20 Lily used her MySpace page to propel herself into the charts with "Smile" and "LDN", two riotously infectious singles from an astonishing debut album, Alright, Still, that went on to sell more than two million copies and establish Lily among Britain's best and brightest.
Her influence, allied to that of her contemporary, Amy Winehouse, has been incalculable. Between them Lily and Amy have bequeathed us a legion of young female singers, from Duffy and Adele and the wincingly derivative Kate Nash to more recent, and in some cases more convincing, Allen-Winehouse progeny: Bat For Lashes; Ladyhawke; La Roux; Little Boots; Florence And The Machine; and, in America, Lady Gaga.
Not that we've thanked Lily for enabling this flourish of female pop talent. She had a very brief period as the nation's favourite gobby songbird in 2006 but the backlash, when it came, was as unpleasant as it was predictable. In common with many young women in the public eye, Lily has been pilloried. I've witnessed, more than once, occasions when her behaviour - sometimes high-spirited, never mean-spirited - was reported not just hysterically but entirely inaccurately.
And then, after a difficult 2008, personally more than professionally (a miscarriage; the break-up of her relationship with her boyfriend, Ed Simons; the death of a number of people close to her), the pendulum swung again, and this has been her best year so far. Her second album, It's Not Me, It's You, was released in February to breathless reviews at home and abroad. By the time you read this it will be close to matching the sales of its predecessor.
Not long before our meeting in America I'd been to a gig in Shepherd's Bush, west London: home turf for Lily, equidistant between her flat and her football team, Fulham, around the corner from the hospital where she was born and the house in which she lived as a child. In her dressing room after the show, Lily was celebrating with her friends and family. Kate Moss was there, and Damien Hirst. So were Lily's parents, and her granddad. Guy Hands, the financier whose Terra Firma firm owns Lily's record company, EMI, came by to pay his respects, along with various people I vaguely recognised from other nights out. It was noisy and drunken and jubilant. Worthy of an award-winner. Which is where we started this interview.
**GQ: Congratulations. You're GQ's Woman Of The Year.
** Lily Allen: Thank you!
**Last year you co-hosted the GQ Men Of The Year awards with Sir Elton John. Quiet night, was it?
** You know it wasn't as bad as it was made out! It was a shame it had to be reported in the way it was. It was fun. It was a great night.
**Were you surprised at the positive response to your album?
** I was. I didn't think it would be received very well at all. Most things I do aren't. I guess I was scared that all the celebrity rubbish had eclipsed the music, which is what I care about. I just wanted people to forget about that and listen to it.
**Do you think you're partly responsible for the negative image you have in the press?
** No, I don't. I think the way I behave is normal for someone my age and in my situation. I know a lot of guys in bands who go to awards ceremonies and get into the same sort of states that I get myself into, and that's not negatively reported on. So it feels kind of unjust. Yes, it's my own fault in the sense that that's how I behave, but I don't think that behaviour is wrong. If it was, I wouldn't do it.
**How much is it true to say you're someone who needs constant affirmation?
** Very true! Why, I don't know. Ask my shrink.
**When did you decide you wanted to be famous?
** I guess when I started socialising. My friends were a lot older. I felt a little bit like the one who was overlooked quite a lot. Especially with my dad being who he was. It felt as if quite a lot of people were looking over my shoulder at him. I think I probably felt as if I'd like a bit of that.
**Have you found what you were looking for from fame?
** I feel like I've done it. I don't want any more. I like it at this level. And I'm happier that a lot of the tabloid stuff is dying down. I'd had enough of all that.
**Can you see a contradiction between one impulse, which is to crave attention, and another, which is to want to be left alone? Isn't that what causes the problem?
** No, it isn't. Sometimes people like to go out on a Friday night and get pissed, and sometimes people like to stay in and watch TV.
**Your predicament is a bit more complicated. Sometimes you go to an event to be photographed; sometimes you don't want to be photographed.
** I never go out to be photographed, never. I go to events because they're fun. I don't agree with that. But it's part of your job to be photographed.
**You're a pop star. You need publicity.
** It's not part of my job. It's the world I live in now.
It's where a lot of my friends are. Not just famous friends but people who work in music, or people in the media. That's what we do. We go out.
**What is your song "The Fear" about?
** It's not about me. It's about everyone. It's about us all. And how the whole world has become some sort of consumerist nightmare.
**Your writing is pretty relentlessly autobiographical. It invites people in.
** I don't know how else to write songs. I wish I could do it another way. Sometimes I wish I was just a girl in an indie band. I could dance around on stage and it wouldn't be so much about me. But I think people can relate to the songs, especially girls. I get millions of messages from girls all the time saying, "That's exactly how I feel." I think "Not Fair" and "The Fear" and "F*** You", people relate to those songs.
Back in Salt Lake City, Lily and I have one more pair of tickets to give away. She hides the envelope under a recycling bin outside the Far West Bank. "If I were a bank I'd be the far west, and under a trash can is where I'd hide best." We retreat across the street.
First to arrive, around the corner of the building like a gust of wind, are a gangly man in a turquoise hoodie and his girlfriend.
They spot Lily and instead of looking for a bin they lope across the street towards us. "We haven't got them," says Lily. "You have to find them."
As the woman turns to re-cross the street, a beaten-up Toyota slices across two lanes and screeches to a halt beside her. A chunky boy, maybe 21, in a backwards baseball cap, leaps out of the driver's seat and races towards Lily. Later we agree he reminds us both of Jonah Hill, the funny fat guy from Superbad. His name is Todd. "We found you!" he shouts. "I can't believe this!"
In his excitement, having nearly hit the woman with his car, he now nearly knocks her down with his shoulder. He's too late, though: across the street, turquoise hoodie is holding the envelope above his head, exultant. "Serves you right," says the woman, but Lily takes pity and Todd and his buddy Nate are promised VIP passes to tonight's show. In return, Lily suggests they give us a lift back to the venue. We pile on to the back seat of Todd's car. As Todd drives, Nate passes us a bottle of Jägermeister, which Lily and I swig from. Nate wonders what we make of Salt Lake City.
Lily cuts to the chase: "Are you Mormons?" "He is," says Nate. "I like to say I'm Mormon Jack," says Todd. "What does that mean?" "It means he takes drugs and then he goes to church," offers Nate.
Lily likes this. She tells it a few times later that night, before and after the show, when we meet more Mormons, both Jack and otherwise. With some of them she is gentle, explaining that she doesn't know much about their religion. With others she's more combative. "You're too hot to be a Mormon," she tells one girl, a young mother of four. On stage she changes the lyrics of her standard curtain call, a Britney Spears cover, from "Womanizer" to "Mormonizer". "Mormonizer, Mormonizer, you're a Mormonizer baby..."
The crowd goes, um, wild.
Possibly wisely, we leave Utah in the early hours in two buses, the band bus and the crew bus. I'm travelling in the former, along with Lily, her assistant Vicky, tour manager Dominic, and musicians Eddie (keyboards), Johnny (drums), Morgan (bass) and Martin (guitar). We have a ten-hour drive ahead of us, across the Rockies to Denver, Colorado. In daylight this would be a spectacular ride, but now it's dark outside. When we pull into a truck stop after a couple of hours and I stick my head out a window for air, I'm surprised to see heavy snow.
On board, in a soft-furnished nook at the back of the bus, it's warm and thick with cigarette smoke. Lily's iPod is dispensing medicinal dubstep and we're all getting drunk at altitude. Lily instigates various games. In one we have to think of Tube stations that rhyme with celebrity names: Amy Limehouse; Notting Bill Gates;
Tina Turnham Green. There's also Piccalily Allen, which doesn't quite work but still gets a raucous laugh. Later Lily demonstrates the dance moves to a track called "Migraine Skank". Later still, she plonks down next to me and insists I quiz her on capital cities of the world. After each one, right or wrong, she demands another, and another, and another...
Lily had been taunting me on e-mail in the days running up to this meeting, threatening a tour initiation ceremony that made me consider abandoning the idea of joining the tour and waiting instead until she got back to London to interview her. "Dom," began one e-mail, addressed to her tour manager and copied to me, "can you remember to pick up a bib, a length of plastic sheeting, a bucket and some gaffer tape for Alex's initiation tomorrow. I'll take care of everything else." Another read: "You are getting it Mormon-style tomorrow night. Get some sleep on that plane, guy.
You're gonna need it."
Happily, by the time Lily remembered that she was supposed to be ritually humiliating me, it was 4am and no one was in much condition to do anything about it. I clambered into my bunk, was lulled to fitful sleep by the rocking of the bus, and woke up beside a car wash in Denver, the subject of this article fast asleep in the bunk beneath me.
Lily started her day in the Mile-High City with a Marlboro Light, a full-fat Coke and half a banana. Later we nursed our hangovers in a liverish diner down the street. On the way back to the bus we stopped at a printing shop where Lily ordered 20 T-shirts bearing the legend, "What Have You Come As?", this statement having emerged as one of the tour's impenetrable-to-outsiders catchphrases, along with "That's What She Said" and overuse of the word "based" as in "Denver-based", "venue-based" or, most often, "bus-based".
That afternoon we were again dressing-room-based, in the bowels of Denver's peeling Ogden Theatre. It was possibly not the best moment to return to our interview. We were both tired and a bit grumpy. I opened a restorative bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. It did the trick. "Don't write that," said Lily.
**I noticed at the gig last night that the girls in the audience really respond to the songs about sex.You write about sex a lot.
** Do I?
**I think so. A lot of pop music is about love. Yours is about sex.
** Sex is love, isn't it?
**You tell me. Isn't there a difference?
** Not good sex.
**You write about bad sex more than good sex.
** Because I feel that you can't love me very much if you're not...
**Do you think men are scared of you?
** Yup. I didn't really think about that before I wrote the songs. But it's become apparent.
**"Not Fair" may be the most terrifying song about disappointing masculine sexual performance ever written.
** Well, I hope it makes you work harder.
**It's quite rare for women to talk about these things so candidly.
** Maybe that's why they've been disappointed for so long.
Historically, women are meant to sit there and look pretty and do what they're told. I suppose we're still seeing the dribbles of that tradition.
**Dribbles being the operative word.
** Exactly.
It's not just sex. You confront other supposedly taboo issues in your songs. **Drugs, for instance, on "Everyone's At It".
** Because I'm not ashamed of myself. I think as long as you're not being malicious and you're not hurting people then you should not be ashamed of what you do. I've taken drugs. I found and find them fun and I don't think I'm a bad person because of it. And I know a lot of [journalists] feel the same way.
**No doubt. But the hypocrisy isn't just in the media.
Most famous people I interview say they've never touched drugs.
** I can't live a lie. I just can't do it. I'm not ashamed of it. Why would I lie?
**Some people in your position...
** Are careerist and they're concerned about what effect it'll have. I'd rather just be honest. [Other celebrities] are living in a world of denial. I'd rather not carry that weight around with me. This is me. If you don't like it, f*** off.
**Do you think you're a role model?
** No. I don't want to be a role model. I think parents should be role models, and older brothers and sisters.
**Are you proud of what you've achieved?
** I'll be proud once I've had kids and they've grown up all right.
**You've got plenty of time for all that, haven't you?
** No. I want to do it now. I don't feel like I'm very good at anything in life and I think that's one thing I probably will be quite good at, being a mum. I think I'll love my kids and I think I'll do it really well.
**Do you need to be in a stable relationship with a man in order to do that?
** No, not necessarily.
**Would you like to be?
** Yes. I don't know. It would have to be the right person.
It's difficult for me to find someone.
**Why?
** A lot of reasons. I want to be looked after and I also want to be with someone who is not intimidated by me and what I do.
That's quite difficult to find. That person would have to be quite successful and powerful. I'd like him to be proud of me but not impressed.
**Is money a factor? It must be difficult for men your age to compete with you financially.
** I wouldn't go out with anyone my age. I have sex with people my age but I wouldn't go out with them. There needs to be an intellectual connection and I don't think I've ever had that with people my age. I'm not saying I'm cleverer than them, but I don't think many people my age are really interested in the same sorts of things I'm interested in. Sometimes, with young guys, I lie there and think, "Did you just say that?" I can't believe it! So juvenile. The trouble with older men is they have baggage.
**Yeah. Like a wife?
** That's kind of a drawback, isn't it? I don't know. Yes.
Next!
There isn't a next.
I'll find someone. It'll be fine. There are people who I'm very much in love with and could have relationships with. I'm not going to say who they are. It's complicated. It's history. I don't know.
I need a lot from people.
**Are you a good girlfriend?
** I'm very generous and thoughtful. I like surprising people and giving presents and making people happy. But I'm also probably quite needy and difficult. I like testing people and pushing their buttons.
**You enjoy the company of men.
** Yeah. More so than women. I've got better at being friends with women, actually, over the past few years.
**What is it about men that you like?
** I like the attention, I suppose. It probably sounds really bitchy, but I like being on tour because I know all my boys, my band, first and foremost their priority is looking out for me, and I like that. I like being in a room and four f***ing bimbos coming in and they're all drooling after them but knowing that really the one they care about is me. That makes me feel comforted.
And maybe that's sick. But I like having the respect of men as well. There's nothing I would hate more than walking into a room and for guys to see me as a sex object. I'm just not interested in that.
**You like to be fancied though?
** Yeah. I like people to find me sexually attractive. ButI don't like people thinking of me as no-tits-and-arse. [Collapses in giggles.] I suppose it's that I spent a lot of my childhood with my dad and all of his mates, in the Groucho Club and going to the football. I just enjoy that, always have.
**Is it weird being friends with Kate Moss?
** No. Why? She's a nice girl. She's fun. Good to talk to.
We can talk about stuff that not a lot of other people can relate to. Sometimes it's quite comforting. Most of the time I hang around with my normal friends and it feels quite awkward when there's paparazzi attention. So to be with someone who understands and takes the edge off me a little bit is nice.
**Are you happy?
** Am I happy? It feels a little bit like I'm in purgatory today.
**You do seem a bit on edge.
** I'm just hung over. It's f***ing weird, this life. It's one thing to the next. There's no real routine. There's a lot of waiting around for the next bit, which is the same, just somewhere else. Now I'm working towards the date when I get back to London.
Then I go to Berlin, then Japan. I mean, I've got a holiday booked, but I know as soon as I get there I'll feel bored.
**Are you scared to sit still?
** I don't like being on my own very much. Just after I had the miscarriage I went into this therapy centre. The hardest exercise they gave me was to sit on my bed for an hour without a book or a TV or a magazine. I was in tears the whole time. I just couldn't handle it. It was awful. I hated it.
**Did you get anything out of that experience?
** There was one exercise where they ask you to draw something, anything. I was like, "What do you mean, anything?" [The art therapist] was like, "Anything: a colour, a shape." I burst into tears. I felt like I was being judged. In my mind I was like, "If I know what she's looking for, I can manipulate the situation and get what I want out of it." I suppose I've learnt from that. I was like, "Right. I've got to stop doing things for other people and start doing things for myself."
**Is that something you've been guilty of?
** If I'm honest about it, it's because I spent my whole childhood looking after my family and worrying about them. My older sister was really troubled, my younger brother was a f***ing nutter. My mum was depressed all the time because she had these mad kids that she had to control and didn't have a husband to help her out with it, and I was constantly trying to make everything all right. I'm learning how to be better.
That night in Denver, Lily and I have an early dinner, two juicy rib-eyes at a fancy steakhouse, where a nervy waiter comes over all unnecessary in the presence of a pop star. Lily talks about books (she's been reading American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld's novel inspired by Laura Bush); telly (she's been watching Michael Palin DVDs); home (she misses her mum's spaghetti Bolognese); America;
England; boys; girls; my life; her life. Back at the Ogden she knocks Denver's hiking socks off before retiring to the bus for a longed-for early night.
A month or so later, I'm in the Groucho Club having an after-work drink, when who should come sweeping through the doors looking for a passion-fruit Martini and a partner in crime? Hours later, on the sofa at my friend Sara's flat, with my brother Crumb and assorted fellow revellers, I remind Lily of the night she made me quiz her on capital cities of the world. "Oh, my God," she says. "I'm so rock'n'roll, aren't I?"
Originally published in the October 2009 issue of British GQ.
*Click here to see GQ's behind-the-scenes video of Lily Allen.
