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1. A song from Dumbo ignited her singing career

Allen got her first taste of celebrity when singing at school in London. “I was in the playground, listening to Oasis – I think it was Wonderwall – on my Walkman, and a teacher of mine… heard me and said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful singing voice. Why don’t we do some lessons?’” Allen was encouraged to sing Baby Mine, a song from Dumbo, in a school assembly. “It brought the house down,” she says. “People were really, really moved… It was a powerful moment for me… From that moment on it was something I wanted to develop.”

Lily Allen performs at the Top of the Pops Christmas Special in 2006

2. She went to 13 schools

Allen struggled in education. She attended 13 different schools and “definitely was asked to leave a few”. She says “I didn’t really understand the point of it. I think maybe because I’d been [around] the creative industries and it didn’t really seem like you needed an education to do those things.” Her parents, who separated when she was a child, are the film producer Alison Owen and the actor Keith Allen. She says her lack of attention was also possibly down to (then undiagnosed) ADHD. “I still find it really hard to concentrate and focus on things,” she says.

3. She was more likely to see her family at Glastonbury than at Christmas

Allen’s father left when she was four, and her mother’s job often took her away for work. Allen says she’s used to not seeing them often and that the major big family tradition was always going to Glastonbury. “I’ve made a joke about the fact that I’m more likely to see all my family members at that festival than I am at Christmas dinner. That’s where we congregate.”

4. Her first hit owes something to Britney Spears

Allen met George Lamb in Ibiza in her late teens. Though better known as a TV presenter, Lamb was then a music manager, who asked to represent Allen. “I said, ‘Yeah, that would be brilliant,'” she says. “He said, ‘You’ll have to write some songs.’” Allen had never written anything but went to work with songwriters and produced Smile. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. “I just thought of the first big song that came into my head, which was Hit Me Baby One More Time, by Britney Spears. I just kind of followed that tempo.” Smile went to Number 1.

5. She was confused by press backlash

Allen became extremely famous in the 00s, which she says she enjoyed, but she was shocked when the press turned against her. “Stardom as a female is very different from stardom as a male,” she says. “I was brought up to believe you could do anything you wanted as a woman, so I was very confused when I got the backlash I did, purely because I’d been surrounded by men who behaved 10-times worse than I did and seemed to be lauded for it.”

6. She doesn’t like listening to her first album

Although her first album, Alright, Still, was a massive hit, Allen would rather not listen to it or play its hits at every show. “I have a lot of respect for it and I think it’s a great record, but it’s not one I really revisit,” she says. “If you had to go back to when you were at university and listen to yourself, putting the world to rights in the student union, you would run a million miles, presumably, because you’d sound like a moron… That person hasn’t experienced anything, so it’s kind of painful for me to listen to.”

7. A song about her daughter led to her acting career

Allen never had ambitions to act. On her album No Shame, she wrote a song, Three, about being a mother. A theatre director and playwright called Matthew Dunster heard the song and thought Allen might be good for a new play he was directing. “He was looking for someone to play the lead role, Jenny, who’s a young mother. That song came on and he thought, ‘Maybe Lily Allen would be good for this’… He convinced me to do it.” The play, 2:22: A Ghost Story, written by Danny Robins, was a huge hit and started an unexpected second career for Allen.

8. She’s considering a whole album about motherhood

“I’m working at the moment on a fifth album,” says Allen. She finds it difficult writing songs when she’s happy: “I find it much easier to write about negative things than positive things." She says she “might just write a whole album about being a mum… I think it would be interesting to talk about how hard it is, because that’s something we as women are not really allowed to talk about, how hard parenting is… There are many, many positives, but there are also negatives nobody talks about. I think that would be interesting to talk about in pop music.”

9. Her kids finally think she’s cool

With nearly 20 years in music now under her belt, Allen says she’s enjoying seeing Gen Z find her work. “It’s really interesting seeing, with platforms like TikTok, a new generation of kids discovering my music for the first time.” She recently performed with Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury, which had an unexpected consequence. “That Olivia Rodrigo thing at Glastonbury was the first time my kids had seen me on stage,” she says. “They thought I was cool for the first time, which was nice.”