Lily Allen, O2 Academy Glasgow, gig review: Good, unaffected fun

The music is never anything less than upbeat

Lily Allen performs at the O2 Academy in Glasgow (Getty Images)

There are public figures out there who many claim they find it impossible to warm to, and doubtless Lily Allen would be high on that list. Yet in person it’s impossible not to take her to heart.

No doubt a sufferer of that acutely 21st century malaise which says anyone – or a pop star, certainly – who breaks with conformity and expresses an opinion must be on some kind of feverish ego trip, she’s warm, friendly and engagingly open without being off-puttingly indiscreet in this live setting.

Allen’s own life is very much threaded through the lyrics of the songs here, while her most significant recent life event forms the stage set around her. A recent mother to a three-year-old and a one-year-old, both daughters, the 29-year-old has cocked two fingers at those who might suggest procreation isn’t compatible with pop stardom by adorning the entire stage with lights shaped like large hanging baby milk bottles.

Similarly, the music’s origins in her own life are made known. “This next song’s about where I come from,” she says before a breezy run-through of the ever-welcome ‘LDN’. “This one’s about my husband,” she informs us as the cheery ‘As Long As I Got You’ bounces into earshot. “This is about having sex after having a baby, which was pretty weird - but everything’s fine now, don't worry,” she reveals prior to ‘Close Your Eyes’. This one may or may not have offered too much information, depending on your perspective.

In fact, there’s a confessional or an opinionated element to most songs, as heard during the rail against people judging those who take drugs prior to ‘Everybody’s At It’ or a gripe at “people who sit at home on a laptop trying to make other people feel bad - they probably have an avatar of Harry Styles” in the lead up to ‘URL Badman’. Such comments might seem overly testy out of context, but she smiles as she delivers them, and the music is never anything less than upbeat.

Beyond the slightly distracting fact that most of these songs are vehicles for her rather than the other way around, there are a number of pop classics of varying weights in here, from the impudent opening groove of ‘Sheezus’ to the dancehall electro-pop of ‘L8 CMMR’ and the day-glow jolliness of ‘Fuck You’, a song which she says is intended to remind us “there’s still a bunch of c***s around trying to fuck things up.”

Changing with a minimum of fuss or ceremony from one sequinned outfit to another, baring her midriff for a photographer and guessing (correctly, as it happens) which paper would run the pictures the next day and seemingly grudging us her John Lewis-abetting cover of Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ (“seeing as it’s coming up to Christmas it’s only fair - unless you hate it, in which case it’s very unfair”) she remained good, unaffected fun throughout.

Yet subtlety when it came, in the shape of an encore juxtaposition of the lyrics to Ty Dolla Sign’s crass ‘Or Nah’ and her own intended feminist anthem ‘Hard Out Here’, was blunt.