Four years ago, Lily Allen had an identity crisis. After two critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums, 2006's Alright, Still and 2009's It's Not Me, It's You, the UK pop star had returned with 2014's Sheezus – a confused mess of spotty songwriting and empty synth-pop. For the first time, Allen, well-known for her incisive wit, sounded like she didn't quite know what she was trying to say.
"I didn't know what I was any more, or where I sat in the market," says 33-year-old Allen, on the phone from London. "The music industry was going through such a difficult time at that point; there were pressures that were associated with putting out new music and making a new record. I feel like, because of where I was hormonally after just having three back-to-back pregnancies, I let other people give me guidance, which I hadn't done on previous records. And I just felt like everything got really confused and was a bit of a mess.
"[I lost] my authenticity and my honesty, and it just didn't feel like a true representation of who I was at the time, so it was really difficult for me to get out and promote that record because I wasn't 100 per cent into it. I dealt with that in a manner of ways, one of which was turning to alcohol and substances, and that had a knock-on effect on my marriage and everything, and it all kind of deteriorated." Allen says, laughing. "But I'm better now."
Allen began writing her new record, No Shame, in late 2014, and finished it in the latter half of last year. "It was a really long and laborious process," she says, exacerbated by the fact that those three years were perhaps some of the toughest of her life.
