If only for his cold disapproving stare — the kind of icy gaze that could send the temperature in a sauna plummeting — Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner will one day make a great parent. Although almost twice his age, I received the treatment last year when I used the words of the twinkle-eyed Catchphrase host Roy Walker — “Just say what you see” — to sum up his lyrical style. He pointed out that, if it was just a matter of saying what you saw, why wasn't everyone doing it? A year on, rather a few more people are doing it, but he was absolutely right. Listen to Arctic Monkeys’ best song, A Certain Romance — with lines like “There's only music so there's new ringtones” — and it's pretty clear that it takes a sharp eye to pick out such poetic pearls from the debris of everyday life.

Our favourite practitioners of “ordinary” have never been quite what they seem. When Madness made the short journey from Camden to Top of the Pops in 1979, the funny dancing and shorn heads belied the well-drilled discipline of a band who, musically, were already a match for their ska and reggae heroes, combined with lyrics that could have been ghosted by a fellow Camdenite, Alan Bennett.

In evaluating Lily Allen’s street-smart pop vignettes, you’d be forgiven for making a similar mistake. Everyone wants to be her friend and, in fact, more than 100,000 subscribers to her MySpace blog might feel that they are just that. Allen is both one of us and one in a million. Far from being fazed by the attention, she commands it with her every move. Like the aforementioned artists, though, she has the gift of pausing an everyday scene and turning it into a painting.

Her debut single, LDN, is a cyclist’s-eye-view of a city which — from the seclusion of a car — might seem more benign than it really is. But even when writing about pimps and muggers, Allen's joie de vivre is the engine that powers Alright, Still.

When the songs are ace she makes cheerleaders of us all. Pitched somewhere between early St Etienne and Betty Boop, Everything’s Just Wonderful is a free-associating attempt to reconcile the world as it should be with the one in which we live — something it manages to do while rhyming Kate Moss with weight loss. The clattering staccato pop of Knock ‘em Out is about being hit on by a man who won’t take no for an answer. Such stories don’t always have a happy ending, of course, but in Lilyworld there’s only one victor. And if the rebuffs don’t work, she can always get her dad (the actor Keith Allen) on to her more persistent admirers.

That she might need to is doubtful, however. On Friday Night — another memoir of small-hours aggro — she declaims: “Don’t try and test me ’cos you’ll get a reaction/ Another drink and I’m ready for action.”

Unfortunately, sheer force of personality isn’t always enough to hold our attention in the face of a few unwise choices. The finger-wagging vixen pop of Shame for You is notable for the killer couplet “Oh my gosh you must be joking me/ If you think that you’ll be poking me” — but it isn’t quite enough to detract from the fact that she sounds as though she is possessed by the spirit of a far less interesting singer.

It isn’t hard to see the rationale of putting the rousing baggy throwback Take What You Take after a beautifully observed break-up tune called Littlest Things. Sounding like a B side by the Farm, it will probably steal the show when she appears at Get Loaded in the Park next month.

For whatever reason, though, her conversational singing style rolls along best of all to an almost horizontally laid-back ska or reggae rhythm.

Happily that accounts for roughly half of Alright, Still — including, of course, the current chart topper Smile. Comparisons have already been made here between Allen and Althia & Donna — whose 1977 hit Uptown Top Ranking still ranks as one of the greatest songs written about being young.

Allen’s carpe diem outlook is no less infectious. But, of course, we’re also talking about a good — in time, perhaps great — songwriter who seems to be incapable of affectation. In another age, someone would have written a musical for her. Listening to Alright, Still you wouldn’t bet against her doing it herself.

(Regal)

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