The Hairdresser Plan

When Lily Allen announced she was leaving music, I took it personally for about a week. She was the kind of artist whose exit felt like a small structural failure—not catastrophic, but wrong in the specific way things are wrong when something that was working just stops. You file it away. You adjust expectations downward.

Then Who’d Have Known? arrived, accompanied by a video in which she kidnaps Elton John because she loves him. As motivations for kidnapping go, this is the one I’m most sympathetic to. The song itself is pure Lily Allen at full capacity: deceptively light, quietly pointed, the specific tone of someone who has decided not to be sad about something and isn’t quite succeeding.

She was playing the Astra in Berlin in early November, which gave me approximately two weeks to execute a plan I’d been developing since becoming a devotee: I was going to disguise myself as her hairdresser. This is less absurd than it sounds. If you’re familiar with Lily Allen’s documented relationship with hairdressers, you understand why access via that particular professional category is strategically sound. If you’re not, I can’t explain it here without it losing something. It’s an insider thing.

The retirement lasted long enough to make the return genuinely good news—not the calculated kind of comeback where the absence is engineered for maximum effect, just someone who said she was done, wasn’t done, and came back with a song better than most things people release after years of careful preparation. The video-with-Elton-John situation suggests her instincts were fully intact.

The hairdresser plan remains viable.