Lily Allen is the ideal 21st century pop star: feisty, funny, connected and one for whom music is seemingly merely a sideline, even if her disastrous foray into chat show hosting suggested television is not her natural calling either.

And she’s back. On Tuesday, there was a low-key warm-up show in Gloucester, but last night’s sell-out marked both her London return and the beginning of the campaign to promote next month’s release of her hugely enjoyable second album, It’s Not Me, It’s You, successor to the
2.3 million selling Alright, Still.

For all the frenzied anticipation and the arrival of celebrities major (Kate Moss), medium (designer Henry Holland) and minor (presenter Miquita Oliver), 23-year-old Allen hasn’t quite thought through her more rocky new direction. By the time she’d finished her eighth consecutive brand new song, the natives had turned restless and were demanding hits.

No wonder, then, that she was twitchy in her sparkling hotpants, admitting: “I don’t know what to say, I’m not drunk enough” at one point and descending into shrill giggling at more than one point. And for one so contemporary, the nursery rhyme F**k You with its playground chorus “f**k you very, very much” was that most quaintly dated of notions, an anti-George Bush rant. Perhaps her next album will explain why Ted Heath is not the man to lead us through recession. Still, there were moments to savour. Him (the “him” in question being God) was sweet and barbed, Go Back To The Start unashamedly rocky and The Fear unusually adventurous.

She’s a studio creation, not a live act and her croaky a cappella introduction to the sublime Littlest Things was a tribute to how expertly she’d been produced on record. When not fighting a losing battle with the traditionally atrocious Koko sound, her weak voice was mostly steamrollered by her band: four gurning, middle-aged session goons whose suits couldn’t quite decide whether to match. She neglected to introduce them, so presumably she didn’t know their names. Disinterested, but drearily competent, they played like they didn’t know her, or her songs. As marriages go, it was more Paul and Heather than Paul and Linda. To placate the crowd, she slipped in the reggae-lite singalong Smile and encored with a surprisingly heavyweight glitterstomp assault on Britney Spears’s Womanizer.

She’ll have better nights than this. I suspect they may not involve her having to sing.