Lily Allen: Alright, Still

Lily Allen is like the perfect modern pop star.She’s the photogenic, self-styled Queen Of Blogs with quips a-go-go (think Vicky Pollard getting hold of Julie Burchill’s razor-deadly Biro). She’s an unrelenting, media untrained 21-year-old whose blog is like an unbovvered raspberry in the face of celebrity, spitting Day-Glo bile in the direction of Edith Bowman and Carl Barât. She’s the salty songbird whose gung-ho girl-about-town ska-pop tunes spun millions of keyboard clickers into a downloading frenzy.

So far, so perfect. Of course, it meant that the haterz arched an eyebrow due to the fact there was a whiff of Violet Elizabeth about Lily ‘Son Of Keith’ Allen’s east London’s grot stylings. But that didn’t matter, did it? Thankfully not.

‘Alright, Still’ contains all the songs that made us fall for her in the first place – the Althea & Donna groove of ‘Smile’, the laugh-out-loud diss of ‘Knock ’Em Out’ and the rum-tale of the capital ‘LDN’. If the pop dreams get slightly tarnished by the graffiti put-downs of ‘Not Big’ (her ex has a ‘size problem’) and ‘Alfie’ (her brother smokes too much dope) then that’s not too worrying. With a personality this size, this isn’t the last time you’ll be hearing from her.

Priya Elan