Saturday afternoon in a brasserie in a chichi Mayfair hotel, and the lifelong friends and nascent podcast queens Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver are in very different moods. Allen is jet-lagged, having just flown in from New York to celebrate Oliver’s 40th birthday. Oliver is the opposite of jet-lagged, fizzy and excited about the party she’s throwing that night. Allen’s elder daughter, 12-year-old Ethel, quietly reads a novel at the next table while her mother sits and chats, albeit not quite with the same deliciously uncensored abandon that has made the duo’s podcast, Miss Me?, such a hit.
Broadcast twice a week from Brooklyn (where Allen lives) and east London (where Oliver lives), the 3,500-mile distance is no impediment to the success and intimacy of Miss Me?, which has consistently been in the Top Ten on the UK podcast charts since its launch in mid-March. So far the show has tackled topics as thorny and varied as virginity, head lice, dating apps, stalking and the patriarchy. (“Did you see that after the patriarchy episode we went down four spots in the charts?” Oliver asks Allen. “We touched a nerve!”). That it has the same raw, uncensored feel as the midnight FaceTime chat you might have with your best friend is deliberate. “I like that we’ve done something [in a format] that everyone probably does with someone they love,” Oliver says. “We don’t like being produced. It needs to feel normal. And it makes me feel like Lily doesn’t live [far] away.”
“I think that’s what resonates with people,” Allen adds. “The familiarity in the way we talk to each other reminds people of their relationships with their best friends.” The two are friends of such long standing that they can’t even remember when they first met. “People keep asking us that,” Allen says. “We didn’t — she was there when I was born.”
“It’s like when you’ve known people for so long that you don’t really know life without them,” adds Oliver, whose mother, the broadcaster and chef Andi Oliver, is still close friends with Allen’s mother, the film producer Alison Owen. The two grew up in and out of each others’ houses in west London (which is where Style shot them, in some of their old haunts) alongside a gaggle of aunties (including the legendary Neneh Cherry) and cousins to whom they’re still extremely close. “We’ve had 39 years of being in each other’s lives, but it’s not just about having a shared past. It’s about growing together, standing up for each other and showing up for each other. Lily still makes me laugh and I love her. That’s why she’s my best friend.”
“We can still be quite spiky with each other, though,” Allen says. “We’re more like sisters than we are best friends. It hasn’t always been plain sailing. We’ve had our ups and our downs, but so does everybody.”
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“In episode two we have a fight, but that’s life,” Oliver says cheerily. “It’s relatable. No one has all their shit together. Me and Lily certainly don’t. Maybe Lily a bit more than me. We have it together more than we used to, but there’s still mess in our lives. Weirdly, doing this podcast has been really great for our friendship, because of how we communicate with each other ‘off camera’. We’re revealing quite a lot about ourselves. We have to protect and look after each other.”
Having found fame at a young age — Oliver was 16 when she started presenting Channel 4’s Popworld in 2001, while Allen was 21 when she released her first hit, Smile — they learnt to look after each other early on. “I had a bit of a nightmare with the press, but not in the same way that Lily has had and continues to do,” Oliver says. “It was quite a strange thing to happen to a young person, and we did feel kind of helpless. You just think that’s the way things are. There’s a lot that Lily went through that I think I just accepted she had to go through. The way you were talked about in the press was horrific, but I don’t know whether it’s any better now.”
“People actively tell you to never complain and never explain,” Allen says. “There’s quite a strict set of rules, which is that you’ve made your bed, so lie in it. You have to accept. ‘See how privileged you are?’ It’s naive to say no one ever tells you how to behave, because they do. They tell you to put up with it.”
Both remember being criticised for their looks, with Allen’s frequent description as “the girl next door” being one of the milder examples. “Because Lily wasn’t glamorous, it became part of the way she was spoken about —[she represented] the other side of beauty,” Oliver says. “And I was always called grubby. I was mixed race, with a weave. I was not put into the sector of beauty or glamour, and that was fine. But it was quite hard to be told that you’re grubby. I was Lily’s bridesmaid at her first wedding [to the builder Sam Cooper, in 2011] and they called me ‘my big fat ugly bridesmaid’.”
In the early Noughties the world was equally hostile towards young women with strong opinions — though, again, they don’t think much has improved.
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“I’d never seen how ridiculous it is until we started this project together,” Oliver says. “We’ll always be very honest and say whatever we think. It’s really not big news that me and Lily have opinions. We’ve always had opinions. If you look at our careers, that’s how it’s always been.”
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Were they hesitant about doing the podcast? After all, despite their lifelong friendship, they’d never worked together before.
“I thought Lily would say, ‘No way,’” Oliver says.
“I kind of did think, ‘No way,’” Allen smiles. “But I was really struggling with writing music at the time, and I’d just finished The Pillowman [the West End play she starred in last summer]. I’m not a planner, but my kids have just started middle school in New York [Allen has a second daughter, Marnie Rose, ten, with Cooper], so they really need me to be around. I knew that I was going to have to stay in Brooklyn. So when Miquita mentioned it, I thought it could work.”
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A recent episode devoted to the Netflix hit Baby Reindeer saw Allen open up about her harrowing experience with a stalker, a seven-year hellscape that started in 2009 and ended with his imprisonment in 2016, after he broke into her home. At the time she was critical of the police, saying in 2016: “The police made me feel like a nuisance, rather than a victim.” Now she says: “I find it interesting that Baby Reindeer has landed so massively. I feel like if it had been a female protagonist it wouldn’t have got greenlit. People will not be remotely as interested in a woman’s story, which is arguably far more common than a male story. I remember when I was going through my stalking thing, when I started to come back outside again and go to dinner parties and stuff, and I’d talk about it. There were a handful of occasions with men that I vaguely knew who would be surprised at how I felt I’d been mistreated by the police, because they had had experiences with female stalkers and said the police couldn’t have been more helpful. In contrast to how women feel when it happens to them, it’s quite upsetting.”
Allen has always been searingly honest about her life, and brings the same honesty to Miss Me?, whose no-holds-barred approach is as popular with Gen Z as with their mothers (my 18-year-old daughter listens as avidly as I do). Does she regret some of the things she has talked about now that she’s older? “I don’t wish that I hadn’t talked about anything. There was a time and a place for everything I’ve said.”
She does regret how the internet has rendered every comment indelible and intractable. “It’s unnatural. I don’t think, as human beings, that you’re meant to share ideas and for them to be set in stone. We are meant to evolve as people. How are you meant to do that if you’re always held to account by things that you’ve said in the past? I said that 20 years ago, when I was a completely different person, hadn’t been married, didn’t have children. Of course I had a different outlook on life. Don’t hold me to that.”
While she uses social media, she worries about its effects. “The creative side of my brain has been ruined by smartphones. I feel like everyone feels the same. I don’t know anyone who could possibly say that the quality of their life is improved by the presence of a smartphone. I think it’s destroyed us as a species. It’s horrendous that they’re designed to be so addictive. Some of us have more addictive personalities than others. It’s evil.”
Last weekend she took her daughters’ smartphones away, after reading a book that claims children shouldn’t use them until they are 14. She and her husband are also limiting their own usage. “I now have a kids’ phone called Pinwheel. It has no browsing capability and no social media, but you can still have Uber and Spotify. My husband is the caregiver on it, so he controls what I’m allowed to have as an app on my phone. I’m the controller of his as well. Because they’re made for kids, he’s my parent and I’m his parent. ‘What’s your child’s name? David, aged 50,’” she giggles.
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Allen married the Stranger Things actor David Harbour in September 2020, in a Las Vegas wedding officiated by an Elvis impersonator (the bride wore Dior). Oliver thinks that Harbour is good for Allen. “He makes her laugh. Lily likes to giggle. From the second I met David I fell in love with his energy. He is very kind. And he really, really likes her.”
“I’ve only just recently started to be able to ask people like my husband or my mum for help,” Allen says. “I went on a treatment, a sort of trauma weekend, in upstate New York. It was just with one person — a one-to-one thing. And what came out of it was this complete inability to be vulnerable. So I’ve been exercising my right to ask for help, and it’s completely changed my life. Just dumb things, like getting up in the morning, being tired, rolling over and saying to David, ‘Can you do breakfast and the school run this morning?’ And him saying, ‘Yes, course I can!’ And I’m like, what?”
Recently Lily did some recording in Nashville, but she says she isn’t pressuring herself to put out an album. “I’m always working on music. And when an album reveals itself to be a completed collection of songs, then I’ll put it out.”
“What about touring?” Oliver asks.
“No, I don’t think so. Maybe, like, five cities.”
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Other than the big bash at Notting Hill Arts Club (where Allen and a slew of other friends, including Nick Grimshaw, DJ’d), Oliver’s future plans involve building on Ropes, her fitness brand dedicated to getting more people skipping, as well as a follow-up to the travel series she made with her mother in 2023, which saw them visit the Caribbean to reconnect with their West Indian roots. After a long period of estrangement from her biological father, Robin Baillie, an art historian in Edinburgh, four years ago she also reconnected with her Scottish roots. “My biological father came to my birthday dinner and he brought a blanket that he had made with Oliver tartan from my Oliver side and Baillie tartan from his side. I was like, ‘We are healing some bridges here!’ My parents were never together,” she adds. “It was just a nice weekend.”
“A nice weekend!” Allen giggles.
“On the heath,” Oliver adds, also giggling. “Just a nice walk in Hampstead Heath. That’s quite a good one for Miss Me?, do you know where you were conceived? I do. Yeah, I was conceived on Hampstead Heath. That is actually kind of amazing. I’ve only got to know all my Scottish family in the past four or five years, and that’s changed how I feel about myself hugely. I’ve been really lucky. I’ve got this whole [other] family now. My brother is 23 and my sister’s 26 and I’ve got a lovely grandma and stepmum and it’s just the best thing I ever did.”
Oliver is not currently in a relationship, so I ask Allen what kind of person she’d like to see her friend meet. “A nice, grown-up person who has their shit together and wants to look after you and lift you up. We don’t want anyone dragging you down.”
“Yeah, we have no more time for that bullshit. Forty!” Oliver says, clearly relishing the novelty of her new age.
“I would hate for somebody to come into your life and start to try and influence you, or dictate how you should be living your life, ’cause you’ve figured it out yourself,” Allen adds.
“That’s the great thing about building your life so good that if someone comes into it they’re only a cherry on top, and not the eggs and flour. The cake has been made,” Oliver says, laughing at her own extended metaphor.
“They’re the baking powder,” Allen adds. “They’re just going to help the cake rise a bit.”
“Yes!” Oliver shrieks. “We’re looking for the baking powder, Laura!” And they dissolve into more giggles, the cherry on each other’s cake.
Miss Me? with Lily and Miquita is available twice weekly on BBC Sounds
Styling: Sara Gilmour. Hair: Raphael Salley at Saint Luke Artists using Amika. Make-up: Gina Kane at Caren (Lily) using Chanel Les Beiges and Chanel Hydra Beauty Skincare, and Nat Minkie (Miquita) using Ilia Make-up and Rare Beauty. Local production: Today Management
