The album Lily Allen never wants to revisit: “Painful for me”
When you’ve been in the game for as long as Lily Allen, you’ve probably learned a thing or two about navigating scrutiny when all eyes are on you.
Releasing her debut, Alright, Still, in 2006 at the age of 21, Allen hasn’t always had it easy. In the past, she’s discussed everything about navigating several issues at the peak of breakthrough fame, from alcohol and drug addiction to how that often affected her character and the way that others perceived her.
A lot of the time, Allen would turn to substance to cope with negative attention, and that escaping in that way made it feel like she could “put everyone to rights”. As she recently reflected to Perfect Magazine, “People that have only known me since sobriety, they’ll be like, ‘I can’t imagine what you’re like when you were drunk.’ And I’m always like, ‘I was fucking horrible.’ I would turn into kind of a bully.”
Part of these struggles surfaces in Allen’s latest record, West End Girl. Although she also states that addiction isn’t a part of her life anymore, she talks candidly about how her struggles with her more recent breakup sometimes felt like some kind of test, like on ‘Relapse’, when she reflected on how she’s been made into “a fucking mess” and nearly broke her sobriety.
As evidenced by these claims, Allen has been through a lot that made her reflect heavily on her own journey and weigh the positives and negatives. On this record especially, she lays everything out, exposing the good, the bad, and the ugly about having your heart ripped out while needing to keep everything together, despite the small wins along the way.
That’s something that Allen noted about her own addiction – that there would be a lot of positives, across the media and other parts of her life, but that often it wouldn’t “register”, because the negatives were much louder. And then looking back and appreciating other things becomes nearly impossible when she also struggles with listening to some of her older stuff, likely because it’s a reminder of a specific moment in time.
For instance, Allen struggles with listening to her debut, mainly because something is unsettling about listening to a piece of material that she created when she was so much younger. “I have a lot of respect for it, and I think it’s a great record, but it’s not one I really revisit,” she explained to John Wilson for This Culture Life.
She went on, “If you had to go back to when you were at university and listen to yourself, putting the world to rights in the student union, you would run a million miles, presumably, because you’d sound like a moron… That person hasn’t experienced anything, so it’s kind of painful for me to listen to.”
Alright, Still was a big moment for Allen and British pop music in general, boasting several career-defining hits, like ‘Smile’, ‘LDN’, and ‘Alfie’. However, arriving at the very start of her career when she still had several major challenges to endure before coming out of the other side, it’s no wonder that it’s hard for Allen to listen to. And that’s without considering that most artists are naturally their own worst critics, without the added sting of youthful naivety.
