In the two years since Alright, Still came out, Lily Allen has gone from being a chirpy pop starlet to a huge, magazine-shifting, tabloid-hounded celebrity. But she's back at the day job with Everyone's At It, the first finished track to emerge from her second album. It makes for a strangely jarring listen. There's appealing electrofied Klaxons sirens, drums that come pounding straight from Standing in the Way of Control-style drums and a few Confide In Me-style "ahhs" ... but something's not quite right.
It could be that Lily's style and delivery are so easy to mock that she'll be forever tainted by a few well-aimed spoofs. Comedian Katy Brand's breezy parody on ITV2 ("I sing about my life, in this song of my life / If you think I'm going on, then fuck you, you're wrong") was merciless. There's been lampooning from within her own culture, too – as the cruel, anonymous track LDN Is A Victim put it, "This is a middle class art school thing, yeah, so put on your common accents and let's all sing." Each of her idiosyncrasies has been blown up and emphasised to such an massive degree now that when she rhymes "I know this for certain" with "poking its head round the curtain", it's hard not to think of Brand skipping around in a ball gown and trainers, singing about walking past a council estate once.
But Everyone's At It suggests that these days, the characters in her songs are only riding through the city on their bikes all day to get to the next party. It's about how we're all "putting shit up our noses", and Lily's trying to get everyone to be honest about it, because "the kids are in danger". "From what I can see, everyone's on it," she laments. Well, that's a showbiz bash for you.
Going on the demos she posted on MySpace a few weeks ago, it sounds like It's Not Me, It's You has far better songs on it than this, and thankfully there's only one more that concerns itself with celebrity, the dreaded subject matter that threatens most second albums. And that's a relief, because before all of the tabloid mania, before insulting Elton John or dying her hair pink would get her on the teatime news, Lily Allen was a proper pop star who made a likeable, timely album about rubbish boyfriends, going out and seeing her mates. Let's hope she's still got that in her.
