Lily Allen blames her own struggles with sexuality for her feud with Cheryl
'Sorry Cheryl. I was angry because I hadn't come yet. It was ridiculous'
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Your support makes all the difference.Lily Allen has offered an explanation behind her infamous, decade-long feud with Cheryl.
In her new memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, Allen writes that her own conflicts with self-image and sexual frustration caused her to feel insecure compared to other female pop stars around her.
“I was frustrated. I was struggling with my own issues around sexuality. I’d never even had an orgasm,” she writes. “And then here were these gorgeous girls — my peers, colleagues so to speak, and co-workers — taking their clothes off with wild abandon and being loved and rewarded for it. I couldn’t take it.”
“Sorry Cheryl. I was angry because I hadn’t come yet. It was ridiculous. I b****ed at Cheryl because she insulted me after I provoked her. You can see how it can go, this playground game.”
The feud was first sparked in 2006, when Allen released a track titled “Cheryl Tweedy”, in which she sang: “I wish my life was a little less seedy / Why am I always so greedy? / Wish I looked just like Cheryl Tweedy.” When Cheryl initially interpreted the song as complimentary, Allen responded in a blog post: “Cheryl, I don’t really want to look like you. I was being ironic. Nobody really wants to look like you, they just think they do.”
When the Girls Aloud singer was later asked about the comments during an interview with chef Gordon Ramsay on his show The F Word, she repeated Ramsay’s own words about the musician, branding Allen a “chick with a d***”.
Allen retaliated in an open letter addressed to Cheryl, in which she wrote: "Cheryl, if you’re reading this, I may not be as pretty as you, but at least I write and sing my own songs without the aid of Auto-Tune. I must say, taking your clothes off, doing sexy dancing and marrying a rich footballer must be very gratifying, your mother must be so proud."
However, years down the line, Allen had come to regret the fall out, telling Q Magazine in 2014: “I wish that whole thing hadn’t happened. I like Cheryl. She’s good on The X Factor, she’s pretty and she’s got balls. I like women who do well.”
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