Lily Allen, who returned to the pop scene with a raucous performance on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury this weekend, is to speak of the dark fears she suffered in the early days of motherhood in an emotional interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday morning.
Allen, 29, who miscarried a baby son after a six-month pregnancy in 2010, now has two daughters, Ethel and Marnie, with her husband, Sam Cooper, but on Sunday morning she will tell presenter Kirsty Young of her “neurotic” concern that her first child would also die. Ethel was diagnosed at birth with a condition that made it hard for her to put on weight and so had to be fed by tube for seven months.
“I was so scared of losing her the whole time really and I tend to go into shut-down mode when things are bad. But Sam was amazing. He would go and defrost the breast milk and try and try to feed her all night. I don’t know where I would be without him,” she tells Young.
Allen said Ethel’s illness, coming on top of a late miscarriage and an extraordinary rise to world fame as a teenager, made her believe that her life was always going to be full of great highs and lows. “Everything seemed to be extremes. I just wanted to be a mum. For things to be normal.”
Choosing tracks including Pulp’s Common People and The Stone Roses’ I Am the Resurrection, a tearful Allen also selects Etta James’ recording of I Would Rather Go Blind which reminds her of the day she left hospital “empty-handed” with her husband after the miscarriage.
Allen met Cooper the day she played Glastonbury in 2009 and she now credits him with saving her from dependence on drugs and an eating disorder. “I was really manic and on the road at the time,” she explains, adding that she was “at a crossroads”.
Back writing songs after a four year break, Allen said she finds the process “cathartic”, adding: “It is definitely one of my coping mechanisms.”
She also tells Young of her annoyance that the word “period” in the track Sheezus from her album of the same name prevented it from being released as the first single. “I feel like things have become more watered down and I could get away with a lot more in my music than, say, ten years ago.”
The singer defends her controversial 2013 video for the song Hard Out Here, which featured scantily clad black dancers. She wanted to be provocative, she argues. “But I have always said I am a mass of contradictions and a massive hypocrite. It is one thing if you are politician, you do have to stick to what you said. But I am a musician and we live in confusing times and it is OK to feel confused. That is a lot of what my songs are about.”
As the daughter of the actor Keith Allen, she admits she is now amused to find herself more famous than her father: “I do quite enjoy that in a horrible way.”
