Lily Allen: ‘Alright, Still’ Review
Lily Allen has never been a people pleaser. She has, however, always been a total hun.
★★★★☆
Since ballooning onto the British music scene via the OG social media hole MySpace in 2006, she’s been embodied by her London grit and gaucheness, much to the disdain of Daily Mail readers and straight-up misogynists across the country.
Despite being the tabloid’s favourite punch bag for a solid few years, sketched out inaccurately as a loathsome character with a penchant for trouble, she was and remains still one of their greatest assets.
Trite tabloid culture existed long before Allen’s time, but the singer-songwriter bit back, and often, always with a tongue firmly in her cheek. She became a boilerplate for their takedowns, which yes, were fired disproportionately at young women treading their first steps of stardom. Allen’s counter-quips and “VERY risqué antics” are exactly what the rags claim as dreadful, yet have fed their readership for more than a decade, and continue to form part of a wider narrative of click bait and gossip-column spiel. They love it.
Allen has never let this irreverence shine as much as on her debut, Alright, Still. Recorded over a two-year period when the singer-songwriter was barely even 21 years old, it’s an unconventionally raw look-in at life as a young person toying with relationships, friendships and London life in the mid-noughties.
Boisterous and unapologetic in it’s delivery, you can understand where irrational resentment for Allen’s misconstrued persona could arise from. But it’s the attitude that drenches her songwriting that makes her the generational success story she is — even bagging three Ivor Novello Awards for it throughout her now thirteen-year-long career.
She sets the scene, both for the album and her subsequent career, with 2006’s summer smash Smile and opening lyrics “When you first left me, I was wanting more / but you were fucking that girl next door / what you do that for?” It’s abundantly clear what we’re in for; chilled out melancholy dotted with revenge builds the foundations for a pretty stellar potential pop princess.
Other singles from the debut record hit similar spots: LDN is an ode to the British capital in all its fabulously filthy glory, with ear-perking anecdotes including “There was a little old lady who was walking down the road, she was struggling with bags from Tesco / There were people from the city having lunch in the park, I believe that is called alfresco”, caught up in a bouncy, reggae-infused beat. Album closer and final single Alfie takes aim at her now-famous Game of Thrones star brother, Alfie Allen. It’s an Avenue Q nursery rhyme talking weed, sex and her sibling being a general ‘twat’. It blends the lines between barbed and playful like only Allen can.
Drips and drabs of ska are found on the likes of Friend of Mine, a bitter yet somehow unexciting attack on a past friend and Shame For You, Lil’s scathing warning to a still-interested ex-lover. Meanwhile, Friday Night features hip-hop licks for three minutes of quintessential Allenisms. “In the club, make our way to the bar / good dancer love, but you should’ve worn a bra” — it’s coated with spiteful immaturity, noted particularly with Allen’s feminist stance in mind, but rolls off her tongue with such slick ease that it would be a plausible freestyle.
Taking into account that more than half of the album space is used to fire off venom at those who have walked in and out of Allen’s life, her clap backs against the click bait become less startling and more of a reinforcement of her ballsy British character. And though her blatant sass is appreciated, it’s her sarcasm that truly gives her the gleam of a pop icon.
Everything’s Just Wonderful, produced by an early Greg Kurstin (who went on to work with the pop juggernauts Kylie, Britney and P!nk), is the album’s triumph. The title alone is a hearty dose of sarcasm, with the track careering past Allen’s greatest woes: from not being able to get a flat because of bureaucracy, to her inability to eat spaghetti bolognese because of the magazines’ regimented favouring of skinny women. It’s skittish yet somehow cool, and pop through and through. Similar sarcy success unravels during Knock ’Em Out, where Allen pretends she’s got herpes to reject a man over a sample of Professor Longhair’s jazzy Big Chief. Musical chaos ensues, and that’s only at track two.
Where it falters? It’s lack of youthful, romantic naivety. At the one point this rears its head, on Littlest Things, we see Allen’s songwriting at its most earnest, but never compromised. “Drinking tea in bed, watching DVDs/ when I discovered all your dirty, grotty magazines” is a jotting about heartbreak that couldn’t be pulled off by any old forlorn pop star, while “Sometimes I wish we could just pretend, even if only for one weekend” is a heart-on-sleeve moment that we just wish we could see more of.
Ultimately, Alright, Still is a landmark debut. Not only did it thrust a young woman into Britain’s marmite jar with such velocity that the papers had an aneurism, it breached the confines of what music, and particularly music created by women, can and can’t discuss. It’s a feat in itself that at the age of 21, the post-Britpop princess knew how to gage her own self and surroundings so much so that she could communicate it almost faultlessly in her debut. From mental health through to syphilis, with one track even dedicated solely to the less-than-impressive size of a partner’s genitals, she’s Lily Allen, and she doesn’t care how uncomfortable that makes you.
Listen to ‘Alright, Still’ on Spotify now.
