Lily Allen: It's Not Me, It's You

The thing I liked about Miss Allen’s debut album was the cheeky mockney accent and the witty snapshots of Chav culture. When I saw her on “Later” at the end of last year she seemed to have adopted a more sophisticated style and I feared the second album would loose the poignant witty working class charm of its predecessor. Thankfully all of the personality and charisma has largely been carried forward into a pretty good follow up. Despite the fact that most of the songs settle down into a familiar style, once you get passed the first chorus, each song kicks off with a musical parody. For example “Everyone’s At It” starts off with a Kaiser Chiefs intro, “Not Fair” has a Ghost Riders in the Sky, Cowboy intro, “Never Gonna Happen”, starts of like Super Mario Sunshine, “Fuck You” has a Carpenters piano intro and “He Wasn’t There” has a scratchy 1940’s intro.

Three of the songs that have squeezed my goolies so far are: “Everyone’s At It", “Not Fair”, and “ Fuck You”, a brief description of each follows:

“Everyone’s At It” is a social comment on a drug-riddled culture where Lily asks, “When will we tire of putting shit up our noses?” She also does a splendid job of avoiding pronouncing any of the T’s in the song title despite singing it multiple times.

“Not Fair” is the tale of what seems to be a perfect, attentive boyfriend who sadly turns out to be not pulling his weight in the bedroom department. His inability to make Lily scream in bed is considered a heinous crime as Lily moans: “I get in the wet patch in the middle of the bed, I’m feeling pretty hard done by, I spent ages giving head”.

“Fuck You” is a sugar coated ditty where Lily vents her spleen at a bigoted, homophobic racist, but in the nicest possible way. In fact I was straining not to sing along to the chorus of “Fuck You, Fuck You, Fuck you very very much” on the Jubilee Line this evening.