Lily Allen Says Her “Daddy Issues” Impacted Her Romantic Relationships

Lily Allen isn't afraid to admit that her complicated relationship with her father had a very real impact on her romantic life.

In the recent episode of Allen's podcast Miss Me? podcast, which she hosts alongside her best friend Miquita Oliver, the singer said one of her more baby-faced 90s crushes was an "anomaly" when compared to the older, "fatherly figures" she typically pursued.

“Because I will always just, you know, I’m daddy issues, aren’t I?" Allen quipped. "I just want a big, old, hairy daddy forever. That’s all I want.

"I know who my dad was, and my dad was sort of there but not there," Allen continued, adding that her father was "inconsistent" while her co-hosts father was completely absent.

"So, I think that you, yours, was slightly like a fantasy whereas mine was, like, trying to recreate something that existed," she added. "Hence the obsessions."

It was far from the first time Allen has discussed how her relationship with her father has impacted her romantic relationships.

In a 2009 interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Allen recalled the “the day that Dad left, and us all saying goodbye to him in the hall of our flat in Bloomsbury."

"I just remember there being a thing of 'does that mean Dad's never going to be around?’” she said at the time. “Then, of course, Dad did go, and didn't come back for a while."

In 2015, Allen expressed her frustration with how her father's inconsistency throughout her childhood continued to impact her as an adult.

“My dad walked out on me when I was 4, I’m sick of this," the singer posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. "My dad was at Latitude when I headlined and didn’t even come to see me. I’ve probably spent more time walking my dogs than I have with my dad my entire life.”

In her 2018 memoir My Thoughts Exactly, Allen described her father as “self-saboteur” and a "narcissist," and claimed he had experienced a cocaine-related heart attack at Glastonbury Festival in 1998 when she was just a teenager, HuffPost reported at the time.

After her memoir's release, Allen revealed she received “quite a cross text from him this weekend" while appearing on the  Jonathan Ross Show.

“He texted me, ‘Err cocaine induced heart attack at Glastonbury? Wow.’ And I said, ‘Sorry that’s what I thought.' I said, ‘I’m really sorry if I got that wrong but that’s how I remembered it and you never explained it to me in any other way so that’s what I wrote’ and he said, ‘Well that’s not true.’"

Allen married Sam Cooper in 2011 and had two daughters before getting divorced in 2018. The singer remarried in 2020, People reported at the time, and now co-parents her daughters with her husband and Stranger Things star David Harbour.