Mums Rule

Lily Allen sounds tired, mildly pissed off and a bit wary, like she's sick of courting controversy and reluctant to open her mouth in case she says something controversial. It's a week after she released a video of herself dancing topless in a spandex fat-sucker, resulting in a Twitter biff with former Apprentice star and columnist for England's The Sun newspaper, Katie Hopkins. “She's just a stupid woman whose whole purpose in life is to look at the things that people are talking about and be horrible about them,” Allen says casually about the woman who called her a “short-arse mother in big pants”. “That's all she does. If you read her column it's nothing ever positive about anything. It's just her sensational views and it's so derogatory – a nasty piece of work.”

“I really like URL Badman,”

No stranger to being criticised online, by celebrities and general internet users alike, it's no wonder her first album in five years, the amusingly titled Sheezus, sees Allen lay down her usual spray of cleverly penned return criticism, delivered in a saccharine voice over upbeat pop tracks.  

“I really like URL Badman,” Allen says of the track in which she takes pot shots at internet trolls, whom she refers to as the Internet Warriors “who can't spell”. “It's about people that have a lot to say on the internet and not necessarily nice things. I think there's a lot of crap that goes on on the internet that doesn't necessarily need to. I think it serves a purpose of making some people think that they have a much more significant voice than they actually do.”

“forget their balls and grow a pair of tits”.

Sheezus is easy on the ears, incorporating a range of musical styles from pop-rock to AutoTuned R&B. But the sharpest aspect is the lyrics, statements about women in particular. Despite claims the title track is a bitch session about everyone from Beyonce to Lorde, it's on tracks like this and Hard Out Here where Allen makes her most incisive and witty quips about everything from periods to calling for men to “forget their balls and grow a pair of tits”. “I think the world, in a weird way, has taken a few steps back in the way that we view and treat women – especially in modern media and pop culture. And I've always made a comment on pop culture and what's going on in the world in my music, so it seems silly for me not to address that.

“I think the media pits women against each other and that's counterproductive. So I wrote a song  (Sheezus) that I felt dealt with that. And, if you listen to the song, you can pretty much gauge what my thoughts are on that.”

Young, intelligent and a mother of two, while Allen was pleased to be back in the studio, she returns with that added familial challenge. “It's tough, as any working mum will tell you... But, you know, it's something that people have been doing for decades so, it's not easy, but it's not new.”