The only problem with the Professor Green and Lily Allen single…

…a little bit of the video for which you can see here…

We're still hoping that Lily's so-called retire­ment is a bit like when Heinz went "we're stopping making salad cream" and everyone (ie the Metro newspaper and various other journals desperate to fill up space) went "oh no this is awful" then The Public went "we should deffo buy some in case we can't buy any more" then Heinz went "oh well perhaps we won't stop making it after all" except it had been planned along. That would be best case scenario here. For people to go "oh please don't go Lily" then for Lily to go "OH ALRIGHT you've talked me back into it", and for that to have been The Plan All Along. Except do you know what the saddest thing is here? That people enjoy watching artists like Lily doing things like this. They just want to see Lily try something else hoping that she will fail so they can bang on about how spoilt and stupid she was for quitting pop, even though they didn't really want her to make another record. Then they will have a good self-satisfied laugh at how stupid she was. That's what people really want, because people (indi­vidu­ally rather than en masse, although often en masse too) are just horrible, and Lily is one of a handful of public figures to really bring out the worst in modern celebrity baiting.

Well because we haven't said it properly yet we want to state here very clearly that we do not want Lily Allen to stop making music. Both her albums have been brilliant. If she fucks off and does something else, whether she succeeds or fails at that something else, there will be a hole in pop where her third album should have been, and another hole where a cobbled-together greatest hits album with new material should also have been. Some brilliant music that should exist at some point in the future will simply never exist. And people won't mind that much because people move on, as people do, because they're absent minded and because they're hungry (if not quite as hungry as the media believe) for new stuff and for lots of other reasons, but that hole will always be there and perched right at the edge of that hole will be the career of a popstar who one day simply stopped what she was doing then went and did something else. Which in some respects is the perfect way to end a pop career, but it will really get our goat.