Lily Allen is waiting patiently her 17-month-old daughter Marnie Rose and asking her: “Are you excited about meeting the magic fairy?”
“Who are these pretty girls? I’m Dolly, how are you?” she says in her best little-girl voice. As ever, it’s impossible to believe that the 68-year-old never had kids of her own. “They’re so cute. Look at that red hair! We have red hair on my mother’s side. And the little blonde! We got blondes in my family. Especially in my wig trunk.”
“I’ve been every year since I was six weeks old,” she tells me, between mouthfuls of popcorn. “It really is my spiritual home. I’d probably trade Christmas for Glastonbury.”
They wed in 2011. “So this year, it’s five years later, I’m married and I have two children, and they’re all going to be there.”
“I’ve been trying to write up a good set list, I wouldn’t probably do all the slow stuff I’d do in my full show, or some of the more serious things, but I want to be able to have heart and soul and tell some stories. So they’re attentive when you talk?” They’ll be attentive when you talk, I say. “Oh, well, that’s great.”
“Oh God, I’d do it in a second. But I couldn’t promise that I’d be on my best form. I’ll have been there for three days. Last year, Kenny Rogers asked me to do Islands in the Stream with him. I couldn’t do it, because it was on a Sunday and I thought I’d be too out of it, in a ditch somewhere,” she laughs.
“I can’t really think of a time when I haven’t known who she was. My mum probably played me Dolly for the first time – a compilation that had 9 to 5 on. It was the only song on it that I wanted to listen to. My favourite song of hers, I think, is Here You Come Again.”
In the creation of an enduring pop image, some compromise is a given, but neither artist feels they’ve had to sacrifice who they are.
“But even when I’m home with my husband [the rarely-seen Carl Dean, whom she married 48 years ago], I always get up in the morning and put on a little make-up and a few hot rollers in my hair, because I don’t want to look like a slouch with him. I’m not two different people, but I am responsible for the persona of the person that you know as Dolly Parton. I know what people expect me to look like. But I can also go home, take off all this junk, and still be the same person.
View Gallery on the source websiteAs for Allen, her songs leave the listener in no doubt that they’re being invited into her world, often with a sense of humour that is misjudged by her detractors. “In my music and the way I present myself, it’s unashamedly honest,” she says. “It’s the real me.
The release of Allen’s album Sheezus earlier this year marked her return to the pop fold after the self-imposed hiatus she announced in 2009. “To be honest, it wasn’t really about coming back, it was more about just writing again,” she says.
“I’d kind of forgotten what putting a record out entailed – the video shoots and six months of promo.” That seems more intense than ever, I say. “Yeah, because you sell half the music you used to. The music industry thinks you combat that by just doing double the promo. Actually I think it just saturates the market, there are too many quotes flying around, and people just get sick of you quicker.”
Allen and Parton are united in their respect for pop’s current controversial figurehead, Parton’s goddaughter Miley Cyrus. “I love her, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about that girl,” says Allen. “I think Miley’s fantastic,” agrees Parton. “Women are taking their power and using it, and it’s great. I’ve always used mine.”
“Women have got a long way to go, but I really think we’ve made a lot of great strides since Jane Fonda starred in 9 to 5. I felt I was part of a whole new movement, especially in the workplace. Women still don’t get as much credit, or equal pay, but there are a lot of wonderful women out there doing a lot of wonderful things.”
“I speak out against it, and I get a real beating for it, but unless more people start screaming and shouting about it, I don’t really know how it’s going to change. I definitely know I can’t do it on my own.”
“I’ve had so many things going, with the tour and the album, all the promotion, Dollywood…” She doesn’t even mention her Imagination Library reading scheme for children, for which she presented the one millionth book in person, to a Liverpool lad before her UK tour opener there.
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