At first, when I see you cry, it makes me smile....

and laugh, and spill your drink, and smoke, and swear....

Yep, last night we went to see Lily Allen at the Hammersmith Apollo in what was one of the most fun concerts I think I have been to. I think it helped that miss Allen was a tad worse for wear in the sober stakes, but it didn't seem to affect her performance at all and it maybe even loosened her tongue even more in between songs, if that is at all possible.

As I have mentioned support acts before in my other reviews, i suppose I had better be fair to the Bird and the Bee. Erm, I thought they were boring. I guess they kind of looked like a sixties pop pastiche type band (I'm not really the best at describing types of music, they had a guitarist, a harpsichord or something similar, a singer with a guitar and then two girl singers in fiftes or sixties type dresses), but the music was dreadfully boring and whiny. That was until they did a cover of 'Do you know the way to San Jose', when the singer girl actually looked happy and the music was poppy again. And then the last song followed this same vein, and if thay had been like that from the start it would have been very good. However, they weren't, and the only thing that sticks in my mind is that they had a chorus in a song that went something like "Why won't you be my fucking boyfriend"....er, maybe because of your use of foul language love.

Back to Lily. The concert was full of young girls, which was great (and not for that reason you pervs!!!). Being short, I can't normally see much of the stage unless I am sat upstairs, but young girls means lots of short people which made it one of my best visibilty gigs (which obviously helps with the enjoyment).

The whole set kicked of with a lively version of LDN (below)



with Lily roaming the stage, and she continued like this for the whole concert, occasionally breaking to get some more drink (when she wasn't spilling it down her dress and then telling everyone it looked like she had wet herself) or another fag. My particular favourites were 'Everything is Wonderful' and the closing 'Alfie' but there were not too many boring parts. She also took a couple of playful digs at Amy Winehouse and Cheryl Cole, plus some less playful ones at Tony Blair and George W. Bush.

I wondered what she was going to do to extend the performance as her album is only about 40 minutes, but she slipped in a couple of new songs, not really selling the second one by saying "This appeared on my MySpace page for a couple of days, but we took it off as it was a bit shit". She also performed three covers, a reggae pop version of Heart of Glass by Blondie which was superb, Oh my god by the Kaiser Chiefs which was OK, and Blank Expression from The Specials, which was also OK, though I have no idea how it is supposed to sound anyway.

Her voice was going by the end, I guess drinking and smoking not too helpful to your voice.

It seems she went to town afterwards and got in a bit of trouble (no surprise as whe was well on her way at the end of the concert). Here is an article with a few pictures (she's wearing the same clothes so I assume it was the same night anyway).