Get off your lazy ass
Alfie, please use your brain
Alfie, Lily Allen (2007)
Lily Allen herself had never been averse to drink and drugs, she wasn’t kicked out of thirteen schools for nothing. So when she lectured her brother Alfie in a song addressed to him, he could hardly take this sermon seriously.
In alfiethe fourth single from her debut Allright, Still, Alfie Allen (1986) gets the wind of his sister one year older. Why does her little brother sit on his lazy ass all day smoking weed in his room or lying in his bed staring at the TV? Don’t screw up your life, Alfie!, she sings to him. How can you ever go to bed with someone if all you do is play computer games? Alfie, get started!
That it would become something with Lily Allen herself, given her artistic environment, with a father as an actor and a mother as a film producer, was quite obvious. But it wasn’t that easy. She was a wild teenager and in The Observer she described her childhood as turbulent’ ‘Our life was neat and everything was quite comfortable, but everyone was crazy.’
Her father pushed her to the record executives, but they were in no hurry to sell her. It wasn’t until she started posting demos on music channels on her own that she stood out, mainly because of her lack of embarrassment. Rough-mouthed and unpolished, she threw everything out. She broke through with her first, great single, smile, in which her adulterous courtship gets beat up: ‘You were fucking that girl next door/What’d you do that for?’
When they alfie wrote, her brother was in Canada teaching snowboarding. Most of all, she wanted to let them know that she cared about him, she later explained, and how funny was it to portray him as a weird, drug-using bastard. “I thought he would be very, very happy because the song proved how much I loved him, that I care about him and wanted him to do something with his life.”
And Alfie did, regardless of his sister’s bullying song. He became an actor, a very successful one. Alfie Allen played the role of for eight seasons Theon Greyjoy in the series Game of Thrones. It earned him an Emmy nomination.
Sister Lily fared a lot worse after her great successes. She literally knocked the paparazzi off. She was stalked by a psychopath for seven years. Her marriage ended because of her addiction(s). She changed her name and never wanted to perform again.
Last summer she appeared by surprise, powerful and sober for three years, at the Glastonbury Festival. She sang her big hit with Olivia Rodrigo fuck you (2009), once a sneer at President George “fucking arsehole” Bush. Now was the message destined for the American Court that had abolished the national right to abortion. Gracefully and in style, Lily Allen presented them with the middle finger.
John & Paul