Lily Allen @ Koko, London

Lily Allen at KOKO Review

1/5
Bands: Lily Allen
Venue: KOKO
Gig: Lily Allen @ Koko, London
Gig date: 28th January 2009
Posted on 1st February 2009 by johnbeyer

There may be little love lost between Lily Allen and EMI’s new owners, but Terra Firma needs to ensure it does everything in its power to keep Allen onside. In a pop climate increasingly hostile to the second album, continuing goodwill towards the 23-year-old singer is measurable by early sales of her new single The Fear, which is already set to end Lady GaGa’s reign at No 1. In Allen’s first London show in more than two years she beamed like a winning schoolgirl on sports day when sharing her good news. That’s an analogy she probably wouldn’t care for. After a well-received succession of songs from the imminent album It’s Not Me, It’s You, a lone voice asked when she might get around to singing a few from her debut Alright, Still. Dressed in dark sequined hot pants and matching tights, with hair that suggested a deal with Pantene may be a mere formality by April, she replied that “the songs from my last album are a little bit juvenile”. Be that as it may, it soon became apparent that the new ones were not exactly like being stuck in a lift with Elvis Costello & the Kronos Quartet. Yes, a certain worldliness was detectable in Everyone’s At I, in which Allen highlighted how much people know about the dangers of drug abuse and how little they’re often prepared to do about it in their own lives. The message might have palled were it not for the medium. Whatever issues Allen has sought to address this time, her pop sensibility remains intact. The relationship dispatches of Not Fair and Who’d Have Known seemed immediately familiar. In the case of the latter, that might have been something to do with the fact that (as she confessed) she had subconsciously plagiarised the chorus from Take That’s Shine. Charm is something Allen has never had to struggle with. Projecting her voice in a live setting has been trickier. Perhaps understandably, given the long lay-off, there was a well-drilled rigidity to her band’s performance that sometimes encircled her voice like a brick wall around a flower. If she needed to remind us that intelligence rather than skill is key to an inspired interpretation, she did so with her encore: a version of Britney Spears’s Womaniser that alchemised Spears’s listless rendition into a razor-sharp dismantling of the philanderer’s delusional mindset. She held the attention with an ease that could teach more gifted singers a thing or two. Pete Paphides

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