Music

35 Lily Allen

35 LDN Lily Allen [download]
How the pop starlet is the latest to make the London accent work for her
It’s November 1976. The Damned have just beaten fellow Londoners the Sex Pistols in bringing out the first ever English punk single. It’s called ‘New Rose’ and it’s delivered in a suitably malevolent mid-Atlantic accent. The Damned huddle around a stereo to hear the Pistols’ response, ‘Anarchy In The UK’. As the guitar chimes out and Johnny Rotten does his Sid James cackle, their jaws drop.
‘We though they were taking the piss,’ says Damned bassist Captain Sensible. ‘It sounded like fucking Black Sabbath with Old Man Steptoe wailing away over the top.’

Thirty years ago, pop stars weren’t meant to sing like Albert Steptoe. Not even punks. English bands dutifully sang in an American accent, bowing to its phraseology, its rhythmic cadences and its drawling, rhotic Rrrrrrs. Feature continues

While many other regional accents of the British Isles were rediscovered in the folk revival of the early 1900s, the London accent remains largely absent from Cecil Sharp’s folk archives. Music hall remained the capital’s only musical voice: Harry Champion’s cockney classics like ‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘Boiled Beef And Carrots’ were densely written, filled with innuendos, often alternating between speech and melody. Echoed by Rudyard Kipling’s bawdy ‘Barrack-Room Ballads’, it was a tradition that was sustained right up to World War II and beyond.

But singing in a cockney accent became something of an embarrassment as rock ’n’ roll swept the nation in the late ’50s. London pop stars like Joe Brown or Tommy Steele would sometimes provide a cheeky nod to music hall – just as Ray Davies of The Kinks or Steve Marriott of The Small Faces would do a few years later – while theatrical songwriter Anthony Newley developed a slightly gentrified cockney accent that plotted a path for David Bowie. But the norm was for born-and-bred Londoners – Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Roger Daltrey – to sing like they’d grown up in the backwoods of Louisiana.

By the mid-’70s, a few bands started to question that. Chas Hodges from cod-American blues-funk outfit Head Hands And Feet formed Chas & Dave to explore ‘cockney rock ’n’ roll’. Ian Dury used funk, blues and jazz as a vehicle for surreal, half-spoken cockney doggerel. Robert Wyatt, born in Bristol but brought up in the Home Counties, spoke and sang in an eerily blank estuary English that was to prove highly influential. And, of course, Johnny Rotten was borrowing from such curiously English sources as Max Wall and Laurence Olivier’s Richard III.
‘Before I saw The Clash and the Pistols, I tried to sing like Otis Redding,’ says Paul Weller. ‘I decided to sing as naturally as I talked.’
‘There was a definite punk agenda,’ says Billy Bragg, ‘which was to regionalise yourself, to give yourself a sense of place. And there was a premium in sounding awkward.’

Bragg acknowledges that a London accent forces a singer to approach melody differently. ‘You can’t sing something like “Tracks Of Your Tears” in a London accent,’ he says. ‘The cadences are all wrong. It’s also difficult to sing harmonies in a London accent. And you can’t sustain syllables for long: “Greetings To The New Brunette”, starts with that sustained “Shirrrr-LEY!” when I sound like a fucking foghorn. You end up with a higher density of words in a song, which betokens a certain urgency. It’s like those early Jam gigs, where Weller seemed like he could hardly get his words out quick enough, as if he was just bursting with the energy of youth.’London singer-songwriter Chris TT agrees.

‘American accents – like Scottish and Irish accents – have a slower pace that allows greater sparseness in lyricism. The word “got” can last for a month when a blues singer sings it, but only a tenth of a second when I do.’ Nowadays the exaggerated sense of regionalism that emerged from punk and received a second wind from Britpop has birthed a host of London-accented artists who follow Weller, Bragg, Blur and Suede. Every other indie band from within 500 miles of Bow Bells – The Rakes, Art Brut, Bloc Party, Athlete, Carl Barât and Pete Doherty, Milk Kan, Jamie T, Mystery Jets – are singing in fluent cockney. And a generation of rappers and MCs who eschew Americanisms aren’t far behind.

Lily Allen’s flat suburban drone is the latest addition to this rich lineage, and ‘LDN’ is a curious concoction. The calypso riff is actually borrowed from Tommy McCook And The Supersonics’ ‘Reggae Merengue’, but is clearly a nod to Lord Kitchener’s ‘London Is The Place For Me’; Allen’s neighbourhood of crack dealers and ASBOs is the dystopian flipside to the fantasy London of Kitchener’s sunny Windrush anthem.

Allen’s deadpan, declamatory delivery certainly draws comparisons with Mike Skinner, and the way in which she exploits the arrhythmic cadences of London speech sometimes invokes Dizzee Rascal. But her poetic doggerel (‘A fella looking dapper/And he’s sitting with a slapper/Then I see it’s a pimp and his crack whore’) owes more to Ian Dury. She convincingly projects a peculiar London swagger that seems to tie up all the loose ends of the last century. She is a post-punk Marie Lloyd; she is Irene Handl reinvented as a calypsonian; she is the urchin flower-seller in Lionel Bart’s ‘Oliver!’ transplanted into latterday Dalston Market. But, this time around, nobody is mentioning Albert Steptoe… John Lewis
Available on ‘Alright, Still’ (2006)