hecklergigs, Lily Allen, Newcastle Uni, 22/10

Usually when we go to gigs and review them we like to give a good detailed account of what happened, so you can get a pretty good feel about the event. However, just this once we're going to bypass all that and just sum up the entire Lily Allen live experience in one word:

Shit.

Yup, that’s right. Lily Allen live was an absolute pile of toss, and quite frankly we’d like to ask Lily, or her dad Keith for that matter, for our money back. We could have spent that £15 we blew getting wasted down the pub. Would have probably been more entertaining, too.

The major gripe we had with Lily Allen live was that the gig felt too manufactured and lifeless. None of the energy and rawness that her debut album Alright Still is bustling full of came across here. We weren’t expecting Lily Allen to have a fully-fledged backing band with brass section, backing singers and everything else that the gig had. Instead we thought it would keep the urban vibe of the album by having a few guys on the turntables, guitar and drums. Simple and effective.

Other problems included that the fact that the crowd only seemed to respond to her two hits, LDN and Smile. That’s maybe because the little kids there can’t afford to scrape the pennies together to get the album. Sadly the only other main cheers came when she covered The Kooks' Naïve. If we were Lily, we wouldn’t be happy if the crowd sung along loudly to another band's song.

If we're being honest, the support act New York Pony Club were much better. Feisty female indie electronics got us rocking away and distracted us from going to the bar to get our £2.50 drink in a cheap nasty plastic cup.

Save your money kids. Don’t go see Lily Allen unless you want to go and see a karaoke-esque performance by someone with no stage presence.

[story by Matthew Laidlow]