lily allen, 2/10/07, webster hall, nyc

prior to valentine's day i came up with what i thought was a genius plan: one of us come up with a place to eat and the other come up with something to do afterwards. simple enough, but neither me nor my girlfriend could settle on who did what until i stumbled across this dandy of a show on the bowery presents site.
having learned about her through byron crawford of all places, she made my summer with some of the best pop music ive heard since that first justin timberlake solo album. and though i heard her first live performance(s) on these shores were a little lacklustre, i couldnt pass this up, especially since it conveniently fell on the night we decided to do this valentine's day shit. so there it was, i chose lily allen, the girlfriend chose seafood.
got to webster hall at about 7 and shit didnt start until about 8. never been there before and it wasnt a bad venue. very house of blues like, drinks were overpriced, not too big but not small. like i said, it reminded me a lot of the house of blues or the metro in chicago.
a DJ warmed up the crowd for about 40 minutes mainly mixing and mashing songs. i believe his name is aaron lacrate, and while he started out kind of shittily mixing a lot of techno with modern rock (franz ferdinand, and not that well) he later redeemed himself by mixing shit like michael jackson and tone! toni! tony!
and then, a couple of jack and cokes later the lights went down and full band came out. all dresed in i believe jeans(?) and green polo shirts, there was a horn section (trumper, trombone, sax), drummer, keyboard, guitar, and bassist...basically a fucking ska band. and then lily came out, wearing a ponytail and a thin material white dress with i believe a thin plaid pattern. they busted right into "LDN" except with her replacing "london town" with "NYC" and "new york town" much to the pleasure of the crowd. and she played basically every song off of her album, and even did a little acoustic medley of songs im not familiar with (she admitted to the crowd "ive only got one album" so she wanted to make it worth our while). and she was basically on point all night. reviews of her earlier shows said she lacked stage presence and that her voice wasnt that strong live, but this night she sounded amazing (though you could tell her vocals were turned way the fuck up). she was burping and giggling for a while there, which she blamed on her lunch (shepards pie from tea and sympathy, which got cheers from the crowd because people love hearing famous people name places theyre familiar with). highlights were "knock em out", "window shopper", "little things", and "everythings just wonderful", which got me thinking about how she might be the anti-pop pop singer.
shes pretty but not say, "hot" like christina aguilera, and her songs are about normal things from a somewhat normal point of view (even though shes the daughter of a famous british actor) or even an almost outsider (socially) point of view (her explaining that "everythings just wonderful" is basically a song saying "fuck you" to the man) and it made me like her even more. but, whatever. simplistic lightshow (there were stars behind her on "little things" which was borderline corny but nice) and like i said, the sound was great. i was little apprehensive about the live band at first, but like i said, most of her songs are set to ska/reggae beats, so logically a live ska band would make it sounds awesome, and they did. she finished her set with "everythings just wonderful" and then came back for the encore, smoking a cigarette (oh yeah at one point she did a shot of jagermeister and the crowd went bonkers) and did her cover of "blank expression" by the specials (which isnt that great of a cover but because its the specials i love it) and finished the night off with "alfie".
all in all, it was great. she sounded great, had good energy, and gave a great show. it made me long for the summer, but what are you gonna do. its february.
afterwards we walked over to max brenner and had a peanut butter and chcolate crepe with some mexican hot chocolate. good times.
fuck your life.