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Lily Allen

In theory, she sounds absolutely fucking awful. She sounds like the kind of person that I spent my time avoiding like the plague at (sorry for name-dropping) Oxford University . She’s got rich, famous parents. She’s the daughter of a famous actor/comedian/boozer/professional party animal father, and a famous mother (she’s a film producer, don’t you know....) In fact, I can’t even remember what her father is actually famous for – he’s one of those people who’s famous for being famous. She even looks vaguely – and I do say vaguely – like the person it’s easiest to compare her to, Kelly Osbourne, both of them being brattish, spoiled rich kid who got where they are today thanks to their famous parents. The internet loves her. Her MySpace page probably clocks up about a billion hits per second. The media already love her, and they loved her almost before she’s released a single record. She’s just 21 years old. She sounds, I repeat, absolutely insufferable. However, put your prejudices to one side. For praise the Lord! Lily Allen has come up with one of the albums of the summer. Pay attention…

Her debut single, Smile, has just spent two weeks at number one in the UK . It is, I have to say, absolutely brilliant, the triple-distilled sound of summer. It bounces along like a forgotten mid-70s Jamaican pop hit, the sound of drunk summer afternoons in the park, with Lily’s voice dreamily bubbling along over the top. The real surprise isn’t the fact that Lily can sing – which she can. It’s her lyrics. The comparison that everybody is inevitably going to make is with The Streets. Like Mike Skinner, she’s got an incredible talent for narrating English life from the point of view of an Everyman. It’s a skill she particularly puts to good use on her real moment of triumph from her debut album, the track ‘Littlest Things’. Against a truly beautiful lazy, lush piano-sampling beat, she sings about the little things she remembers about a failed relationship – sitting around the house wearing her ex-boyfriends tee-shirt, finding his stash of pornography under his bed (What? What do you mean it’s never happened to you?!?)…

It’s also the way she sings. With her ‘London-posh-girl-trying-to-be-ghetto’ accent, she sounds, and I have to admit, unfathomably cool. Like the Arctic Monkey’s, she’s figured out that throwing in slangy expressions and a smattering of expletives always makes for a perfect pop song. In fact, Lily Allen has already been tipped as being ‘The Next Arctic Monkeys,’ who last year took the British music industry by storm thanks to their fanatically loyal internet fanbase. And because the music industry moves so quickly nowadays, being tipped as ‘the next…’ is actually a self-fulfilling prophesy. She is The Next Arctic Monkeys, period. There’s no need to tell you that she’s going to be huge – she already is.

OK, OK, admittedly, she’s got where she is today thanks to a little help from mummy and daddy. A good example: the guy who works with Gwen Stefani has written some of her songs for her. How many normal 21 year olds would get someone like that writing for them before they’d ever released a single song? This, however, is how the pop industry works. Get over it. The cream doesn’t always float to the top. But surely that’s the point about pop – it’s not about talent. It’s about entertainment. And if Lily Allen is phenomenally entertaining, it’s partly due to the fact that she’s a cool kid with cool parents whose live is about a million times cooler than you or me could ever be in our wildest fantasies. She is, when it comes down to it, a bit like Kelly Osbourne, but a million times cooler, a million times more fun, and songs that’ll make you dance around the garden in your underwear. Lily Allen might not be around this time next year. She will, however, brighten up your summer immensely. Catch her while you can.