14 DAY TRIAL // Lily Allen is back from self-imposed retirement but, if you’re thinking the time out, which she took to spend with her family, away from the spotlight, has mellowed her out, you’re wrong. Speaking with the February 2014 edition of Esquire magazine, Lily goes guns a-blazing after her fellow pop stars.
Lily has never been what you might call a “traditional” pop star in that her music always had a certain edge, which also applies to her interviews. She doesn’t strive to fit the mold and she would rather fall off the radar than change something about herself and be inauthentic.
To Esquire, she describes the disappointment she had when she first came to the US to launch her career across the pond, and how shocked she was to see that all pop starts were practically variants of just one “person.”
Things were different back in the ‘90s, she says. “I feel like when I was growing up and dreaming of being a pop star, it was the days of Britpop when things felt authentic and anarchic, and people were taking drugs and having a lot of fun and it wasn’t fake, it was real,” she says.
“So excuse me if I found it a bit disappointing when I arrived and it was a bunch of sterile [expletive]-ing botoxed idiots that stank of desperation,” she adds.
In time, she realized that this wasn’t the place to be, so, when she got pregnant and she saw that all those people she considered “friends” simply turned their back on her, she decided she wanted out. The negativity in the industry, from her mates, from her fans, from the critics, was the second reason Lily opted to retire.
However, she believes the time is right to come back now.
“I feel very lucky. I couldn’t ask for much more really. And actually I’m not really asking for much more. I’m not trying to take over the world here. I don’t want to be Rihanna. I want to sell some records, sell some tickets to my shows and live my life,” Allen says.
Lily Allen’s first single, “Hard Out There,” was met with lots of criticism, as various voices accused her of racism in choosing as backup dancers / video vixens African American women whom she had dressed up in scanty clothes, twerking in the background.