Lily Allen is chirpy cheek chic

Now, just when she’s threatening to retire yet again, the 24-year-old is beginning to get her act together. She got the basics right: an impressive stage set, terrific lighting and a band who lurked furtively in the background, instinctively knowing their place.

Allen, who previously tended to give the impression that she’d arrived on stage directly from a topsy-turvy weekend with a Geldof child, looked the part too, with wigs of varying shades and outfits that said "star" rather than "out of her depth".

And she was in fine fettle, whether giggling that "nobody’s ever tried to beat me up except for Cheryl Cole" after Littlest Things, cheerleading for British troops in Afghanistan ("there’s a difference between supporting the troops and supporting the war," she noted, sternly) or enjoying a fan’s disruptive dancing at the front.

Like few others, Lily Allen sets the tone at her shows: she was in a sweet mood and, as a result, everything worked. She covered Britney Spears’s Womanizer dressed as a burlesque lapdancer and Kaiser Chiefs’ Oh My God. She severely truncated her own LDN and gave gravel-voiced Clapton newcomer Professor Green a thrilling cameo on her singalong Smile and The SOS Band via Beats International’s Just Be Good To Me.

Of course none of this frippery could disguise the fact that singing is an alien concept to her. Even the good-natured crowd who rooted for her as if she was an underdog struggled to stifle a giggle when she tried to hold a note during The Kooks’ Naive. It sounded like sporadically emptying bathwater.

Yet if she couldn’t sing, she could chirp and since she appeared committed and had built such a friendly, easy-going atmosphere nobody really minded.

And chirp she did, over her best song, the supertight Back To The Start; over the naughty nursery rhyme Fuck You, which she dedicated to the mysterious Streatham Council (doubtless raising eyebrows at Lambeth Council HQ) should they have anything to say vis‑à-vis her smoking on stage and over the closing Not Fair, where she exhibited a zeal I never imagined she was capable of.

"I’ve been Lily Allen," she concluded. "I hope you enjoyed yourselves." We had, we had.

Lily Allen
O2 Academy Brixton
Stockwell Road, SW9 9SL