On BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs today, Lily Allen chatted to Kirsty Young about drug-taking, her eldest daughter falling ill, her amazing husband Sam Cooper and the terrible time she went through after suffering a miscarriage at six months.
Typically straight-talking, and having chatted about the music industry ('if you bring out something that's not as good as the last thing, it's like 'oh ha ha aren't you embarrassed? You should be ashamed of being so stupid' so that's hard') the conversation steered closer to home. When talking about her eldest daughter Ethel falling ill with laryngomalacia a year after she was born in 2011, the 29 year-old got got audibly emotional: 'It's basically a problem with the throat. She was working so hard to breathe, to just exist really, and she wasn't really gaining any weight at all. Because all of the food she was taking on, she was just expending the energy on this breathing process,' she revealed. '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'
The singer's had her fair share of ups and downs - from the height of her success to losing her first child; one of her Desert Island Discs was *I Would Rather Go Blind *by Etta James, the song she listened to when she came out of the hospital 'empty-handed, as it were' after miscarrying. 'At the time I remember thinking it's weird how I seem to have all these unique experiences. The highs along with the lows. From playing the main stage at Glastonbury to 70,000 people, to losing a child'.
Moving onto her well documented drug taking, she spoke about the height of her problem in 2009, upon the release of her second album *It's Not Me, It's You: *'It was manic on the road and being chased by people , having my life being splashed all over the papers, people in my group of friends selling stories about me, it all brings on horrible spells of paranoia. My way of coping with it was to not eat very much and get as wasted as I possibly could. I never remembered it, I used to think 'what happened last night?''
But in terms of her children, she won't be imposing any hard-and-fast anti-drug rules. 'People are going to do what they want. I can warn them about the dangers, and I'm not going to encourage my kids to take drugs, but I'm not someone who imposes rules on people...'
Other songs she chose included Pulp's *Common People * - 'because it takes me back to an era I very much enjoyed watching from the sidelines, the era of Britpop when my dad was at his most anarchic' - and I Am The Resurrection by The Stone Roses thanks to her recent 'resurrection' with Sheezus. **
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.