'I like living in the present,' says Lily Allen. Photo / Supplied
'I like living in the present,' says Lily Allen. Photo / Supplied
As Lily Allen prepares to hit Auckland this week, she's not the same woman she once was, discovers Craig McLean.
In a freezing car park in downtown Seattle, Lily Allen is giving me the tour of her bedroom-on-wheels. There's a full-sized bed, which has a tendency to come away from the wall, "so sometimes I wake up over here," she says, standing by a large wall-mounted screen with Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Lily striking a pose. Photo / Supplied
"Super-nice," the singer-songwriter says, smiling, acknowledging a binge-watching addiction to Homecoming, the new podcast-turned-thriller series starring Julia Roberts. Next to the bed, at pillow-level, is pinned a drawing of a heart. "I love you mummy," it says, a note from Ethel, 7, big sister of Marnie, 5.
The bed itself is covered by an open suitcase, full of shoes, just shoes. Allen - who's been touring the world on and off since the release of her landmark, voice-of-the-West-London-streets debut album, 2006'sAlright, Still - also has a dozen pairs of trainers spread over the eight items of luggage she's brought with her. "But I haven't really brought that much," she insists.
This bedroom has been Allen's home away from home for the past five weeks. The 33-year-old, her two-piece band and a travelling party numbering 20 in total have been driven up and down, back and forth, across North America. Welcome to the No Shame tour, titled after her well-reviewed and Mercury Music Prize-nominated fourth album.
This is how one of the UK's most distinctive - and controversial - musical voices rolls, 13 years into her music career. After launching her songs via the then-groundbreaking route of sharing them freely on Myspace, Allen hit No.1 with her first proper single, 2006's Smile. She topped the charts again in 2013 with her cover of Keane's Somewhere Only We Know. And throughout her rise, Allen, a brave and opinionated speaker, has never been afraid to engage with the issues that fire her up, especially on Twitter.
This bedroom has been Allen's home away from home for the past five weeks. Photo / Supplied
Still, it's a calmer, wiser, considerably more family-oriented Allen who meet in Seattle. The 21 shows on this tour were scheduled around her children's half-term, the better to allow the musician to respect as much as possible the joint custody arrangements for her two daughters with ex-husband Sam Cooper.
She is, then, in a good place, albeit desperate to return home. Allen is counting down the hours - 72 of them - until she will touch down at Heathrow and head straight home to her flat in north-west London for a family Sunday lunch with her daughters and boyfriend of three years, Tottenham grime MC Meridian Dan.
Still, all that organising, all that travelling, has come at a cost. "I've got so fat on this tour," she says, swaddled against the Pacific north-west cold in a Maharishi sweatshirt and scarf. She appears a little tired, but is otherwise glowing and healthy-looking,
The cause of her weight gain is not bad diet or drinking - the latter the curse of her last American run, in support of her misfiring 2014 album Sheezus. That tour was a catastrophe of indulgence (alcohol and drugs), partying (morning, noon and night) and sexual misadventure (boys and girls, dancers and prostitutes). Her life spiralling out of control, Allen was serially unfaithful - not least with female sex workers - to her husband while on the road.
Lily Allen turns 34-years-old in May. Photo / Supplied
Allen lays bare that intensely troubled period in eye-watering detail in her recently published autobiography, the bestsellingMy Thoughts Exactly.
The reason for Allen's weight gain is steroids. The week before I met her she'd had to cancel three shows due to "inflamed everything" around her vocal chords. She's been prescribed elephant-strength medication.
"They shoved a camera up my nose and had a look at my vocal chords," she explains in her London accent. "My whole face was just f***ed and my eardrums were a bit swollen, so my in-ear monitors weren't fitting properly. It wasn't painful, it was just like running out of petrol … And it's scary because, as much as I want to give everyone the best show I possibly can, my voice is my livelihood, so I can't push it. Because once it's f***ed, it's f***ed for ever."
Onstage in Detroit, she was 50 minutes into her 90-minute set and trying to sing an acoustic version of Family Man, a heartbreaking song about her split from Cooper. "And I burst into tears and had to walk off!" she says laughing. "I've never done that before." Really? Not even on the round-the-clock chaos that was the Sheezus tour?
"Well, I don't think I cared about the sound, I was so f***ed up." She laughs again. "What's been really striking on this tour is that we've played a lot of the same venues, and I haven't recognised them. That's how much of a mess I was. I've gone into dressing rooms and [venue staff] have come in saying, 'Oh my God, so good to see you again!' I'm like, 'I don't know what you're talking about'." Another burst of near-manic laughter. "So, yeah, that was worrying."
For sure, Allen has cleaned up her act since she last toured. A break-up, a breakdown and then a divorce can have that effect. This time there has been no serial infidelity, and no class-As. Not that she's gone super-healthy. "I'd like to say I was going to the gym but I'm just terrible." But while she used to fill her time on the road with "drugs or shopping ... now I do neither. I spend a lot of time reading the news, getting irate.
'What do I spend my money on now? My kids. I'm also really bad at keeping track of stuff.'
"I'm not sober, by any stretch of the word," she clarifies, and nor has she completely forsworn cigarettes. "But I'm also not completely hammered from nine in the morning onwards. And I really care about the gigs this time round and want them to be as good as they can be. Whereas I didn't really care before," she admits with another peal of laughter.
She concedes that her lack of care wasn't just a hallmark of the Sheezus era. In fact, even on her first two albums (her second, 2009's It's Not ME, It's Youwas another number one, as was lead singleThe Fear), fun was Lily Allen's priority. I remember seeing her at the Coachella festival in the Californian desert, in 2007. It was certainly a lively performance, not least because "I forgot every single word to every single song. Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan gave me a spliff just before I went on and I forgot everything," she explains. "I got stage fright after that, thinking that I'd forget the words again. Ever since then I have to have autocue."
Was she concerned that another US tour would be a trigger for her, tipping her back into bad behaviour?
"Yeah, for sure. Funnily enough, I went to see A Star Is Born two nights before I came out here. And I had to walk out halfway through because I was, like, 'Triggers!'" she exclaims.
Last time, she toured lengthily to escape a private life that was in meltdown. She and Cooper, who married in 2011, endured the stillbirth of their first child George, a difficult second pregnancy and postnatal depression. Allen was also stalked - for seven years. At one point a mentally ill man, Alex Gray, burst into her bedroom in the middle of the night. Allen's own detective work finally compelled the police to take action (in 2016, he was sentenced to an indeterminate hospital order). No wonder she wanted to run away.
This time, though, she's touring for the right reasons: to make money as a single parent. The irony, however, doesn't escape her. "I have a job to pay for a house that I can only afford if I'm not living in it!" she hoots again. "So weird. But, I guess, I am providing a roof for my kids, which is ... good?" she says, raising her voice, tentatively, questioningly.
Lily Allen grew up in chaotic circumstances all over London. Her father walked out on her, her mother and her little brother, actor Alfie (Game of Thrones), when she was 4. For a while comedian Harry Enfield was her de facto stepfather but only for a while.
Money, care and attention were in short supply. As Allen tells it, as her mother rose through the ranks of the movie industry, she spent more time away on film sets, while her father pursued a life of carousing. In My Thoughts Exactly Allen talks openly of feelings of abandonment and neglect - and, as a result, of her numerous ill-starred romantic and sexual relationships that followed. The book is never less than emotionally bracing and, as Allen says on more than one occasion, it was important to put "my truth" out there. Allen writes about being sexually assaulted by someone she calls "Record Industry Executive". She wanted to name the man, but lawyers counselled against it.
"I can't be too specific, but he works with a lot of acts that are very prominent acts at my record label," she tells me. "And I think you can pinpoint when that happened and when investment stopped happening into my career . . . "
On stage that night at Seattle's 1,100-capacity Showbox club, Lily Allen is in great form, inflamed "everything" notwithstanding. In a fluorescent lime-green-tinged blonde wig and sparkly emerald frock-come-pantaloons, she entertains the rapturous, heavily female audience with a set largely drawn from the spartan, lyrically pointed electro pop of No Shame - and with a story about how, the last time she performed here, her encore was delayed by a bad case of diarrhoea.
She is, brilliantly, that kind of pop star: one with no shame. As is evident a couple of hours later, around midnight. Toting a Bluetooth speaker broadcasting reggae playlists from her iPhone, a cheerfully refreshed Allen dances with a couple of fans in the freezing car park in which her tour buses are parked.
The rest of her tour party head off to a bar, determined to make the most of Seattle until the buses' 3am departure. But not Allen. Sensible rather than insensible, she climbs aboard her bus, pausing only to remove her wig before falling asleep.
As she'd indicated earlier, it's a quieter life these days.
"What do I spend my money on now? My kids. I'm also really bad at keeping track of stuff. Moving from venue to venue, hotel to hotel, small things get lost. There's no point in buying jewellery, it just gets nicked or lost. And I don't go out, so there's no point on spending money on clothes or handbags. Even the live show - everything is stripped back, less distraction. With me at the centre of it, with my truth. That's what I feel like is my currency."
Ask her if she's happy, and she's initially, unusually, stumped. 'It's a difficult question to answer,' she ponders. "My kids are thriving and they're happy. And me and my ex-husband are communicating well. And, um, I like living in the present. So, yeah, I feel good in those respects.
"But I can't say I'm on top the world. Because the world is a daunting prospect."
LOWDOWN: Who: Lily Allen What: Plays Auckland's Spark Arena When: Saturday Tickets:From Ticketmaster
