Lily Allen is recording her first solo track in three years. Here, Eva Wiseman joins her on set and talks to the unfailingly honest singer about feminism, surgery and the joys of motherhood
A year ago, if you'd been walking down Harley Street late one morning, you would have seen Lily Allen leaving a plastic surgeon's office covered in the fine black lines of a steady-handed pen. It was two years after the Daily Mail ran a graph charting "the ups and downs of her ever-changing figure", one year since she'd publicly discussed her bulimia and the recent loss of her child, and months since she'd given birth to her first daughter. She was feeling fat. She had gone for a consultation about laser liposuction and, after advice from the surgeon, booked in for more – as well as her thighs, her arse, he recommended she reshape her ankles, her belly, her knees and her back. Except, four days before her operation, she found out she was pregnant again. And so – she's Lily Allen – she wrote a song.
On a bright cold day on an industrial estate outside Wimbledon, near a dusty Chinese takeaway called the Charisma Café, a café that appears to have been built out of chips and irony, Lily Allen is standing on a sound stage, being a pop star again. Her new song booms through air fragrant with the fresh-paint smell of things going right. This is not just a pop song. This is a feminist text with a really catchy drum beat. This is not JUST a pop song, this is an open letter to Mail Online, this is a cackling wink at modern misogyny, at women's roles in 2013, at bloody Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines", even. While his video, for one of the biggest hits of the year, featured balloons that coyly spelled out "Robin Thicke has a big dick", her balloons say "Lily Allen has a baggy pussy."Could this be the first chart hit containing the word "objectifies"? It's good to have her back.
We first met seven years ago, when Lily's debut single was about to be released. She was 21, on the very, very cusp of extreme fame, and she was exactly the same. The same sweet, intimate singing voice that makes you think you know her. The same massive Manga eyes, the same dirty London laugh and sweary opinions, even the same fringe – a glossy dark iPad of a thing that slices across her eyebrows. Except, today, it's sprayed with a stencilled word: "Bitch". "Dolly Parton is a bitch. Adele's a bitch. Angela Merkel is a bitch…" She's sitting in the make-up chair listing bitches, of which she proudly counts herself one. Her song echoes under the door. "Rihanna's an inspiring bitch, my mum, Miley's a bitch, rising. She's my hero. Kate Middleton is NOT a bitch." Beside her, a manicurist painstakingly attaches rhinestones to a set of long acrylic nails.
The new track, her first solo record in three years, is called "Hard Out Here". It's the pop-opposite of the Keane song she's covering for this year's John Lewis Christmas advert. "Forget your balls, grow a pair of tits," she sings, sweetly. "It's hard out here for a bitch." Bitch, Lily admits, is a complicated word. Its use as an insult rose in the 1920s in parallel with women's suffrage – as women shouted louder, so did the people who hated them. In the 1990s, Elizabeth Wurtzel's book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women set out "the bitch philosophy". "I intend to scream, shout… and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers. I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself," Wurtzel wrote.
"I've always been called 'mouthy'," says Lily, "when, in fact, I'm just talking. In the music industry, women have always been controlled by male execs, told to do the Kate Moss thing. Keep your mouth shut, or people will laugh at you. They've been talking about us like this for years, basically."
Three years ago she left London and moved with her husband, Sam Cooper, to a house deep in the countryside. You have to drive through three fields to find them, which is why, she says, she hasn't paid much attention to pop culture. Lily, who memorably launched her career in 2005 by posting a demo of "LDN" on Myspace, doesn't have broadband. "It's nice," she says, "but it's weird. I'm totally out of touch. When I first started, in terms of girls it was just me and Amy [Winehouse]. Now, 'reentering the marketplace', it's all girls."
But it's different, she adds. "Nobody says anything real today. Most of those girls have their songs written by other people. It annoys me, because 'eh oh eh oh ahh' is not a chorus – that's not a point where I feel 'we're connecting', you know? I need a narrative." The difference between Lily seven years ago and Lily today, I realise, is that seven years ago she would have listed the artists that annoyed her, and explained in detail exactly why. The quotes would have been splashed across the tabloids, followed up by a careful, media-trained response from the artist she'd discussed, and a handful of broadsheet pieces about role models and feminism.
Today, while she's certainly not holding back, she seems less interested in igniting bombs. More in setting fires, with a well-angled magnifying glass. Perhaps because she's older, perhaps because she's a mother now, perhaps because of that Harley Street moment. Rather than objecting to the women who succumb to the media dream, she's objecting to the structures that pressure them to do so. "I want to sing about different things now," she smokes. "Before I was married, my songs were directed at significant others. Now I couldn't be happier, so it's opened me up to write about more general stuff. There are a couple of songs to Sam, including one sexy one, about coming to terms with becoming sexual again after just being a baby-making vessel. But mainly they're funnier and happier – less lethargic, less teenage."
A big, lipstick grin. "I'm not moaning at the world any more. Before, I was struggling. Coming out of adolescence and not knowing where I was in the world – now it's about ownership and empowerment." And objectification. "I'd like to think that my children's generation won't feel like this. Like I do. I want them to realise that not everyone can be fucking 'hot'. Rather than attractiveness being the end prize, it should be as rewarding to be clever or funny, or, you know," she says, striding across the studio, "have your, your 'thing'." She takes a sip of champagne through a straw before taking her place on a mirrored dance floor. It's 11am.
The video is a scene from Lily's anaesthetised dream. It opens with her on the plastic surgeon's table, fat being pumped, juicily, out of her stomach. "How does a woman let herself get like this?" asks her American manager, over her gowned body. "Lack of self- discipline," suggests the surgeon. "I've had two children," she replies, drifting off into a fantasy world of tits, arses and kitchens. On set, someone takes a light reading against her cheek and a gang of bikinied backing dancers rehearse behind her. "LESS SEXYFACE," shouts the choreographer from beneath a sharp baseball cap. "GIVE ME LESS SEXY, GIVE ME MORE STRONG."
It's a warm day for October and, in breaks between takes, we crouch on the step outside and talk about the past. Sometimes, artists say that looking back at old work can feel like reading your teenage diary out loud. Just as embarrassing, just as raw. How does Lily, whose songs have always been noisily personal, feel about the eras of Lily that have come before? She laughs like a pretty seal. "Har har har! It's funny you say that, because we were talking about doing the Lily Allen School of Drag."
Oh yes?
"Yeah! Teaching different Lilies how to be me, through the ages. How to smoke and drink and sing at the same time, how to catwalk in Air Max, how to be the pink-haired tragic Lily, how to be the Bambi dress in a K-hole at an awards ceremony Lily… How do I feel about them? I feel FINE about them!" She says it again, louder for impact. "Fine! The thing I don't like is that it was so long ago. I don't think I'm going to suit being old. That thing of – I always used to be the youngest bitch. Little Lily. Now I'm not. That scares me a bit. But that's a product of today's media, isn't it? The world makes you feel like your life is over."
One of the things that her fans find so attractive about Lily is how comfortable she is with technology – from those early blogs on Myspace to her Twitter presence today. And part of that is her engagement with, as she calls it, "the bottom half of the internet". The commenters who follow her from story to story, telling her she's a bad mother. "I read it. I read it all, and they're 90% horrible. Is that because everybody hates me? Or is it just an easy way for them to make themselves feel good, by saying something bad about someone else?" She shudders slightly. "And sometimes it can be really hurtful. Like when I lost my baby."
In 2010, after a brief virus, her unborn son died six months into pregnancy. "I couldn't get my head round how people could be so horrible. But I learned pretty quickly that I was very vulnerable, and this [the internet] wasn't the place to spend my time. I still think about it 25 times a day. Before… this, before what happened to Sam and I happened, I was quite vocal. I complained about a lot of things. I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to grieve with someone I loved. There are women who have to deal with this on their own, so even though it was tragic, I knew where I was in the world and the people who were important to me and what mattered, and what didn't. The thing I took away from this was that I couldn't believe I'd ever complained about anything ever before in my life. But," she smiles, finally, "I'm almost ready to complain again now."
Minutes after she gave birth to her first child, before she had told her mum, she says, the Daily Mail was on the phone. "The placenta was still IN me." They told her they knew the baby's sex and weight, and asked if she wanted to comment. It's partly this, partly everything else – the way they've picked over her life like meat on a bone, used her saddest moments as hooks for gossip columns – that led to her speaking out against them.
"The Mail Online is like carbs – you know you shouldn't but you do. Probably two or three times a day." She laughs, drainily. "I hate them – it's an atrocity, really. But I still go on it. It's my homepage. These lyrics are a message to them, in part. We keep going back," she takes a long pull on her cigarette, "we keep going back, because they've made us feel so shit that we have to compare ourselves, to say 'haha she's fat too', in order to feel better."
Last year, Mail Online's editor explained his editorial methods to the New Yorker. Asked why he ran a story about a celebrity's acne, he replied, "Well, we all just looked at the picture and went 'Yuck'. Look, she's an actress in 90210, and she's spotty." They use women in a dark and hateful way. And yet women, including Lily, make up more than half its readership. On we scroll, every click a pinch, until we look down at 6pm and see a dark blue bruise. "As well as a message to the Mail though," Lily sighs, "it's a message to men. Men have started feeling insecure, and historically – my mum told me this – at the same time that women started doing well in the workplace they started being encouraged to feel shit about the way they looked, because it was the one thing men had control over. And over time, because of things like plastic surgery, we feel like we can and should change."
What if she had gone through with the surgery? What if she hadn't been pregnant and had walked out on to that same pavement ever so slightly different? How different might Lily, might pop music be, today? Does she ever consider… going back? "Now I know what the female body is capable of I have a lot more respect for it," she says, quite quietly. "My wide hips are for squeezing babies out of." But this, this is a line drawn. This is the end. She doesn't want to keep talking about her body, to keep reading about other women's post-pregnancy bellies, the gaps between actresses' thighs.
"The longer we talk about it," she says, "the longer it's allowed to be something to talk about." The studio is booked until midnight – Lily's been here since dawn, in shoes the height of ponies and a slash of glitter on her eyes. When I leave, she is leading her dancers in another take of tongue-in-cheek twerking, and she is mouthing the song with glossy lips. "We've never had it so good, uh-huh we're out of the woods, and if you can't detect the sarcasm you've misunderstood," she grins at the camera, "It's hard out here for a bitch."
Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.