Lily Allen and Richard Ashcroft have to come to blows over the former Verve frontman’s recent claims that musicians should stop making political statements.
Last month, Ashcroft made headlines when he called for artists to ‘stop making speeches’ and ‘go back and entertain the world‘.
“So many fucking artists, man, if they can’t write a song or they can’t sing or they can’t play, they end up being like semi-political leaders, or believe they have to have a million causes to hide the fact that they can’t do the very thing that we want them to do,” he said. “Ultimately, if someone’s paying hard-earned money to see me play live, they don’t want a rant about what’s happening on the other side of the world,” he continued. “They don’t want to know which way they should vote.
“We don’t give a crap. That paradigm has been broken, smashed by music. That’s where music is power.”
During her recent ‘In The Bathroom’ interview, Allen spoke out to voice her disagreement – arguing that women’s voices in the press need to be heard.
“I was watching an interview with Richard Ashcroft the other day when he was talking about wishing musicians would just shut up and get on with what their meant to do, which is music and not get involved with like social issues, social commentary and politics, because it’s got nothing to do with it,” said Allen. “And it’s just like, that’s all very well for you to say Richard Ashcroft, your a middle-aged really successful white person, who won’t have to have gone through a lot of the things I or indeed many other girls would have to have gone through.”
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She continued: “The treatment of women in the press is political, it’s almost on the front line of women’s issues because the way we read about women in tabloids and popular culture is how we form our opinions of what women’s roles are in everything.
“Having been a subject of that for so long, I think about the agenda a lot and it’s not actually to do with me a lot of the time, it’s just to do with the fact I’m a girl. You have a few ways to deal with that which is to retreat and stop talking, or you can decide that isn’t the case.”
After the story was posted to LatestCelebrityScoop’s Instagram page, Ashcroft replied in the comments to describe Allen as a “Train wreck dressed as a hashtag”.
In her new memoir My Thoughts Exactly, Allen writes about her own refusal to be silenced over her political statements.
“I don’t react well to being bullied or backed into a corner,” wrote Allen. “I don’t want to be silent. That’s why I keep tweeting – even though my Twitter feed is hijacked by people tweeting hateful comments – many of them sexist.”
Allen continued: “I don’t want to be silent. Women have been silenced for millennia, and I’m not going to be part of that. I want to speak up, and if that means I sometimes get it wrong, then then I should be able to correct myself, apologise, move on and still carry on speaking up.”
She added: “As a woman, I’m not meant to be an angel or a saint or a martyr or to have faultless encyclopaedic answers all the time. I’m a woman only, and like all women, I don’t ask for special treatment. Like all women, I just ask not to be repressed or silenced.”