The Stoop

Well, it seems clear her time is now, in an era when strutting girls with a fizzing music box of tricks and an empowered attitude to match are, more than any other 21st century incarnation, running the show. For Lily Allen, then, read Little Jackie, and dispatch the drab, cloudy LDN hangover for Manhattan skyscrapers and the colourful lollypop street noise of the Big Apple in 2008. Coppola takes the fashionista world of Allen, Amy Winehouse and producer du jour Mark Ronson, rewiring it so that every minute is a sun-glazed Saturday morning, the sidewalk bouncing with the bulbous sound of ‘The Stoop’.

There is much to enjoy here beyond the brash confidence, in the fresh but hyper booze and fags litany of life of ‘28 Butts’ and the NYC rallying call of ‘Crying For The Queen’, as Little Jackie sneers at Winehouse with a cutting diss of “It’s time for you to get clean and stop creating a scene”. Like the buttered-up soul of Gnarls Barkley, who Jackie has opened for, the sparkling sonics, all sliding string flourishes, colourful keys and parping Stax horns, are as undeniable as the self-proclaimed coronation of ‘Black Barbie’. Besotted, hypnotised Kens should join the queue here.