LILY ALLEN is back with a new album, Sheezus. The album was produced by Greg Kurstin, except for the title track which was produced by DJ Dahi and Air Balloon which was produced by Shellback. At the end of 2013 Lily released the first track from the album Hard Out Here which is platinum in Australia and has amassed over 22 million YouTube views. Here John Niven reflects on his pal. 

She was hopping across the sunlit backstage area, dressed as a blue pixie, laughing. Her eyes were like black, bottomless saucers. A man said something rude to her and she turned around, smiled sweetly, and then tore him to pieces. I had no idea who she was – she was just this fizzing cocktail of innocence, fun and abuse. It was at Bestival, on the Isle of Wight, in the summer of 2006. She was barely twenty and, as it turned out, she had just recorded her first number one.

The next time I saw her was after an awards ceremony, in a pub in Mayfair. I knew who she was now. Everyone knew who she was now. She was sitting at a table surrounded by men in expensive suits. There was iced champagne on the table but she looked sad and faraway, like she was being forced to play a game she wasn’t interested in anymore. It was the winter of 2010 and a lot of life, a lot of experience, had happened to her in the four years since I first saw her.

I saw her again, recently, across a crowded London restaurant. She was talking, emphasizing a point she was making with a sharp swipe of her hand. She looked happy, clear-eyed, her perfect white teeth bared in a smile. She was twenty-eight now, a wife and a mother of two.

When you listen to Lily Allen’s new album it sounds just like that sharp swipe; like a decade of experience, heartbreak, joy, mischief, pain, trouble and fun: the whole of your twenties wrapped in sleek, brilliant pop music.

On Sheezus her talent lies not just in mentioning that women get periods in a pop song, but in gleefully mentioning it three times in the same line. And all of this while the lyric goes about its business of dissecting exactly why women in music are automatically assumed to be in some kind of bear pit with each other.

Then you listen to L8 CMMR, which is not so much about a party guest, or someone slow to latch onto trends, but about your lover’s powers of delayed ejaculation and your face lights up as you realise that there is much here that will offend all the usual people. And so what? As the late Sid Vicious said, ‘I’ve met the man in the street. And he’s a cunt.’

And then I saw the girl again, on my television. She was singing ‘It’s hard out here for a bitch’ while pretending to hop across the screen like a little bunny, like she was doing at Bestival, all those years ago. Like you never see any of those other women do, in their race to be the sexiest, the raunchiest, the nastiest one on the block.

And I thought – wow.

Somehow, after seven years in this terrible racket, this sausage factory of the soul, she never lost sight of herself. She’s a wife and a mother and a Global Recording Star (as they say in America) and somehow, still, she’s that saucer-eyed 20-year-old pixie, galloping across a field. She kept her innocence.

I must ask her how she did that sometime.