Lily Allen was always an enviably cool girl.

When she first burst on to the music scene nearly two decades ago at 21, it was with a breezy, don’t-care London swagger. Her songs concealed big, painful feelings under flippant, deadpan lyrics and deceptively sweet melodies, which made them easier to swallow. Even this summer, when she talked on her thrillingly unfiltered podcast Miss Me? about having lost count of exactly how many abortions she’d had, she sang the words to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s My Way.

In the noughties, she seemed fearless, getting paralytic at awards ceremonies and picking public beef with Madonna . However, it looked as if she might be settling into a quieter life when she married Sam Cooper and had their two daughters, but within four years they’d split up

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