In July 2006, there was no denying the chokehold that Lily Allen had over British radio airwaves. Or, perhaps more “modernly,” the chokehold she had over the internet, transcending the border limitations of “U.S. Top 40” thanks to MySpace. And the song she did that with was, of course, “Smile.”
That same July, Charli XCX—then still just “Charlotte Aitchison”—would have been thirteen going on fourteen. A formative time to hear Allen’s confessional, “bratty” songs, XCX’s own early “MySpace music” was very much informed by Allen’s then “avant-garde” lyrical style, daring to say things that women—least of all British women—never really had before. In 2024, XCX went so far as to tell Chal Ravens during an interview for Resident Advisor Exchange, “I was obsessed with Lily Allen.” That obsession still comes across in her current work, most especially Brat, which has all the simultaneous braggadocio and self-consciousness of Alright, Still-era Allen.
In a full-circle moment of mutual admiration, Allen has repeatedly expressed her love for XCX, saying, among other things, that she’s trying to be “beg friends” with her (this announced during the July 29, 2024 episode of the Miss Me? podcast titled “Listen Bitch! Beggies Can’t Be Losers”) and, more recently, in a Q&A with Mel Ottenberg for Interview, she confessed to having “about five [Finstas]. One’s a fake Charli XCX account.” That’s right, an account where she pretends (or pretended, at this juncture) to be XCX. Something that would have blown Charlotte Aitchison’s mind if she had been told this by her future self in ‘06. The year that “Smile” not only dropped on the internet, but also as a single featuring “Cheryl Tweedy” and “Absolutely Nothing” as its “B-side.” It’s the former track that has more than a few shades of XCX’s “Sympathy Is a Knife” to it, the overarching theme of both being a self-loathing comparison to another woman who serves as a kind of “benchmark” or “gold standard.” Not just in terms of looks, but in how their “polite,” “virtuous” personalities are lauded by the media (though, in Cheryl’s case, that wasn’t shining through when she was convicted of assault in 2003).
For Allen, the choice to home in on Cheryl (who hasn’t used her last name for ages) was less about any personal beef, and more about selecting a woman who embodied an unattainable ideal for most other “average” women. Then, of course, there’s something to be said for the fact that Allen probably also chose her because it’s easy to rhyme “greedy” with “Tweedy.” As in: “I wish my life was a little less seedy/Why am I always so greedy?/Wish I looked just like Cheryl Tweedy/I know I never will, I know I never will.” The lament and combined sense of ruefulness and resentment in her voice is apparent. Much the same as it is on XCX’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” which differs from Allen’s “insecurity track” in that, even though it doesn’t name its target, all the clues regarding who it’s “inspired by” are there. Most glaringly in the lines, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” The reference to “her boyfriend’s show” being George Daniel’s (who has since become her husband), the drummer for The 1975. Thus, when Swift was “dating” (a word that seems much too big for what actually went on between them) the band’s frontman, Matty Healy, XCX was essentially forced to spend more time in her orbit.
A “forcing” that led her, evidently, to get all up in her head when it came to comparing herself to Swift. Not just aesthetically, but also “success”-wise. Hence, the moment in “Sympathy Is a Knife” where she admits to the listener (and to herself), “Volatile/At war with my dialogue/I’d say that there was a God if they could stop this/Wild voice tearin’ me apart/I’m so apprehensive now.” This followed by the line about not wanting to see “her” (Swift) backstage at her boyfriend’s show and the emotional gut-punch of the chorus, “‘Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried/I’m opposite, I’m on the other side/I feel all these feelings I can’t control/Oh no, don’t know why/All this sympathy is just a knife/Why I can’t even grit my teeth and lie.”
Allen, too, has often had trouble gritting her teeth and lying, more prone to shout the truth (or at least her truth) from the mountaintops sooner or later rather than keep it all bottled up inside. Even when it meant expressing the extreme self-hatred she felt during one of the peaks of “the culture” being designed solely to make women feel bad about their looks when they couldn’t fit into the “neat” box of being tall, thin, big-titted (nothing short of a miracle to be so when you’re also thin), blonde and, therefore, “hot.” Something Allen additionally reckoned with in her memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, remarking on her decision to “come for” Tweedy, “Here were these gorgeous girls [with Allen referring to Tweedy’s girl band, Girls Aloud, as a whole]—my peers, colleagues so to speak and co-workers—taking their clothes off with wild abandon and being loved and rewarded for it.” All while Allen 1) felt too dowdy in comparison to do anything like that and 2) probably knew she wouldn’t be praised for it in the same way even if she did have the courage to do it.
It was (and is) a level of pressure that men couldn’t possibly understand or empathize with—this as they work in conjunction with the patriarchy at large to fortify the very industries (namely, beauty and entertainment) that thrive on female competitiveness. Thus, it’s no wonder Allen, particularly at that time, was feeling disgusted enough with herself, her appearance to chirp, “I wish I could fit myself in my pocket and tie myself to a rocket/And send myself to outer space, I wish I had a different face.”
For XCX, those feelings of physical inadequacy were also deeply ingrained in her as a teenager growing up in the 2000s, when Britney Spears was the “Boring Barbie,” so to speak, of the day (and, in another parallel between Allen and XCX, it’s a case of two brunette Brits wishing they could fit the mold of two different American blondes). Which is why it should come as no surprise that she should commence “Sympathy Is a Knife” with the declaration, “I don’t wanna share the space [this referring to both the literal space and the figurative space that is “Being a Female Pop Star”]/I don’t wanna force a smile/This one girl taps my insecurities/Don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling.”
As Swift would confirm to XCX this year with her “reply” of a “diss track,” “Actually Romantic,” it was very real indeed. And one best believe that, just because she’s been lambasted for the petty track, it hardly means that Swift is thinking what Allen also says on “Cheryl Tweedy”: “I wish I could apologize, be dignified/Wish I could look you in the eye/And tell you that I never lied and wish that I could stop the cries.” Quite the contrary. Swift, a girl who came up in the 00s herself, is, if anything, only too happy to sow the discord, for as she douchily told Zane Lowe during a rather defensive interview about The Life of a Showgirl, “The rule of show business is, if it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping.” Or so she would like to tell herself in the wake of not having an album “favorably reviewed” with overwhelming unanimousness for the first time in her entire career.
And it’s a backlash that’s come at a kismet time in terms of the Industry Gods still smiling upon XCX, even as she breaks out into a new medium by pivoting toward acting. In fact, she’ll soon have more films under her belt than albums, with eight movies already “in the can”: 100 Nights of Hero, Sacrifice, Erupcja, Faces of Death, I Want Your Sex, The Gallerist, The Moment and a still untitled Takashi Miike project. Needless to say, there’s no way that any of these films will be as badly received as the scant offerings in Swift’s filmography (especially Valentine’s Day and Cats). So while XCX might have found herself questioning her worth as compared to Swift’s prior to 2024, she’s surely gotten just a bit of a confidence boost to fortify her against these feelings since that period of time.
Even Allen, too, is at last getting her flowers thanks to West End Girl, the album that’s reminded an entirely new generation of the influence she had on someone like XCX. Back when she was spitting the original lyrics to “Sympathy Is a Knife,” as it were, including, “Oh, I wish I didn’t smoke so many cigarettes [a very brat activity]/Another program on antiques on the TV set/Wish I had blonde hair, wish I had green eyes/So many things about myself that I despise.” Except that, in 2025, this pair of brown-haired British women has cause to be far less self-hating than the women that originally incited them to write their respective “I wish I was her/I’ll never be her” tracks.
