LA - Lily Allen @ yOyO

I was all set to wax lyrical about Lily overcoming gremlins in the sound board, and winning over the crowd with her witty lyrics, infectious smile, and the voice of Janet Kay reborn in a chain smoking white chick, when…Lily posting on her ever entertaining myspace blog declared that it was in fact..

“a shit gig ……………….sorry to anyone who came , I know a bad workman blames his tools and all that , but I had to fire my soundguy tonight, it was rubbish, and if I thought it was me I would put my hands up. I sang my smoke infested little lungs out and it made no difference. I’m so so sorry, I really am. I’m so embarrassed!”

LA - Lily Allen @ yOyO

Picking up on the bad workman theme I took some pics but it was very dark, the camera focus was playing up, and the memory card was out of memory… Lily Flickr set here

Also did a review for Gigwise here, and my brother penned an amusing very enthusiastic summing up of her tracks so far, declaring that he may as well “throw the rest of my music collection on a big bonfire and listen to these songs again” Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before.

Elsewhere and the backlash has begun. The irony free Guardian accused her of being a middle class mockney with no business talking about life on “da street”, surely similar to being called “a washed-up junkie” by Pete Doherty. It also likened her to GayDad which in a boxing match would see points deducted for low blows! Lily understandably was fairly pissed off:

“The Arctic Monkeys sold records because they gained a huge fanbase from sites like myspace , and then went on to do well . Gay Dad (1999) flopped because they were hyped within the music industry and the music press/ tastemakers before playing gigs and gaining fans. The urban / mockney stuff upsets me , because I think it’s mindless , I sing in an english accent for fuck’s sake , I grew up in London ,and no, I don’t come from Chelsea I come from Angel , yes , I grew up in a middle class family and I’m not trying to hide from it. I don’t talk about pimps , crackwhores and grannies being mugged because I think it makes me cool , I talk about them from an observational perspective.”

The Guardian’s sister paper The Observer has partly made amends by featuring Lily on the cover of this months “OMM”, and a decent article, even if they did refer to her as Lily Cole is the previous days paper.

Channel 4 were at one of her gigs, and “The Death Jam” thought she was great, although shorter and tuffer than expected. He also sweated like a rapist!

Buy: Pre-Order the Lilly Allen album “Alright Still” at Amazon for 9 quid.

Listen: Grab Lilys “My First Mixtape (70Mb)”,(fixed the link now) featuring Lily herself along with a bit of Dizzee, Lindy Layton, Rod Stewart, The Squeeze, and Cutty Ranks (tracklist here).

Update: “Lily’s Second Mixtape” available now.

Download a demo of “Smile (MP3)

Cheryl Tweedy (MP3)

Mergaman – Elderly Lady (on Myspace) (not Lily but a kind of alternative to Nan youre a window shopper…and made me laugh)

Watch: The video to the soon to be No.1 “LDN (stream)” / LDN (YouTube)

Smile (Youtube)

Look: My pics of Lily at yOyO 18/05/06

Nice pics of Lily DJing at yOyO

Bearwitness pics of Lily at her second yOyO gig

Read: Lily tells Time Out how much she loves Shaggy.

Squirrelfood asks her about riders, and covering the Kaiser Chiefs.

Lily tells SlamXHype about chargrilled lamb and airmax 90’s.

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