Music

Yes, Lily Allen has been hyped to the stars and back by every paper, style mag and music blogger. Yes, her dad is the ignoble ‘comedian’ Keith Allen; yes, her mum is the renowned TV and film producer Alison Owen; yes, she’s become a poster girl for the MySpace website; yes, she’s not a proper cockernee. So it comes as quite a shock to discover that her debut album is actually rather fantastic.

The first thing that strikes you is how craftily her producers Future Cut (aka drum ’n’ bass DJs Darren Lewis and Tunde Babalola) have woven a host of antique jazz, reggae and pop samples into the cutting-edge beats to fashion smart pop hooks. ‘Knock ’Em Out’ starts with the boogie-woogie piano riff from Professor Longhair’s ‘Big Chief’ and then, brilliantly, plonks a diwali dancehall riddim over it before mutating into The Streets’ ‘Get Out Of My House’. ‘LDN’ uses a calypso lick (from Tommy McCook & The Supersonics’ ‘Reggae Merengue’) but ties it to a hip hop beat and a slight ska skank. ‘Alfie’ starts with the woodwind-and-chimes riff from Sandie Shaw’s ‘Puppet On A String’ and tags on some hilariously inappropriate thumpy grime drums. Then there are Allen’s lyrics, which can be amusingly Catherine Tate-ish (‘Oh my gosh you must be joking me/ If you think that you’ll be poking me’) but also exploit the arrhythmic cadences of London speech to serve up Ian Dury-ish doggerel (‘A fella looking dapper and he’s sitting with a slapper/Then I see it’s a pimp and his crack whore’). Often she sounds like Terry Hall in the Specials, undercutting all those jaunty Jamaican rhythms with a world-weary, bathetic, English drone.

Crucially, Allen’s glottal stops have the opposite function to the way that Britpop’s Little Englanders used the cockney accent. Allen looks beyond that well-worn Kinks/Bowie/Weller lineage, her voice becoming a conduit for black music – both homegrown, American and Caribbean. It’s the London of Lord Kitchener’s ‘London Is The Place For Me’ as much as it is the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy In The UK’, of Dizzee Rascal’s ‘I Luv U’ as much as Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’. And it’s a London that’s never sounded so good.