Lily Allen says she has mostly given up music for acting as she struggles with criticism in today’s “political climate”.
“I still write songs with some sort of frequency, but the elephant in the room is that the political climate is really difficult at the moment for creative output,” Allen, right, told Australian media. She added that she feels “stifled” writing songs and posting on social media, particularly now that she is sober and doesn’t have alcohol to help feel less “exposed”.
Allen, who has often shared her Left-wing views, says she is a “lightning rod” for criticism from the “other side”. She apologised after her 2013 video Hard out Here was accused of being racist for its use of black female dancers.
Allen is now starring in the Sky Atlantic show Dreamland. “On the stage acting, I feel like I get to explore the same subject matters, but I don’t have to take responsibility for them” she said.
Theatres bring in bodycams to stop abuse
SOME theatres are fitting staff with cameras in an effort to tame bad audience behaviour. Trafalgar Theatres, whose 14 venues across the UK include the one on Whitehall, told The Stage that bodycams would help “lower the temperature”. Police were called to a show in Manchester this month when some in the crowd agressively refused to stop singing along. Will cameras bring down the curtain on abuse?
Suella considers phone-in self-defence
Suella Braverman says she nearly called into a recent radio phone-in debate over whether she is racist. “I thought about calling in as Margaret from Fareham,” she says in The Spectator. She was criticised for comments on the ethnicity of grooming gangs. The generally combative Home Secretary added: “A core part of my job is ensuring... I don’t consistently displease a majority”. Don’t bank on her trying a gentler tack, though.
Is death better than Dollis Hill?
David Baddiel risked the wrath of north-west London promoting his book The God Desire last night. Speaking in an Intelligence Squared event at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle, he and host Richard Ayoade wondered whether an afterlife was always better than nothing at all. Baddiel said thoughtfully: “I was living in Dollis Hill in 1973 ... it wasn’t unlike death”. Cue angry letters...
Ronnie remembers the rocking Sixties
Guitar man Ronnie Wood showed a set of his art works at the Rolling Stones shop in Carnaby Street yesterday, telling us that the area “used to be rocking... in the Sixties”. Celebrating a new edition of “Guitarscapes” prints at the RS No. 9 Carnaby store, Wood joked that lockdown “made me do a lot more work: there was nothing else to do”.
In Marble Arch, Cush Jumbo and Gugu Mbatha-Raw attended a dinner for brand La Mer at restaurant Frameless, while activist Malala and her husband Asser watched new film Polite Society at The Curzon Mayfair.
And elsewhere, actor Luke Evans celebrated the launch of a new Plymouth Gin “Ocean Edition” bottle, created with the Ocean Conservation Trust at London Shell Co, while director Baz Luhrmann chatted with Ai-Da Robot at the launch of a new Design Museum show, in association with Bombay Sapphire gin.
