Sophie Heawood writes in The Times about the chart-busting sound of London 2007: young, talented and friends with Lily Allen:

Something strange is happening in the pop charts. Though midweek positions may have changed by the official chart rundown on Sunday, the top three currently contains a debut single by a 19-year-old singer-songwriter called Kate Nash, and one by her male equivalent, the 22-year-old Jack Peñate.

Who are they? Well, they’re part of a new generation of 21st-century troubadours who sing heartfelt, funny stories about their young London lives and have been helped to the top by their scene queen, Lily Allen.

…

The tabloids love to call Allen “pint-sized and potty-mouthed”, as she frequently takes to bitching on her blog about more established pop stars such as Girls Aloud and Madonna. But what goes less reported is that she also gives a generous helping hand to many of her contemporaries on their way up. Peñate is a good friend whom Allen met on London’s music scene and who has since been taken on tour with her as a support act, while Nash was a stranger whom Allen “adopted” after hearing her music.

“I first read a tiny thing about Lily in a magazine a couple of years ago, so I looked her up on MySpace and added her to my ‘friends’,” Nash says. “She had written on her blog that she was really against ID cards, so I wrote to her and said I thought it was really good she had said it. Then a month later I looked at her page and she’d put me in her Top Eight friends list!

On a related topic, there’s now a Myspace group to help put bands wanting to play at NO2ID-related gigs in touch with local NO2ID groups that want to arrange events: http://www.myspace.com/no2idmusic

This entry was posted by andrew on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 07:44 and is filed under General, Neutral, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.