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Lily Allen · S5 E3
Sam Cooper
Love, Cotswolds, and trying to be someone normal
St James the Great Church, Cranham, Gloucestershire, June 11, 2011. Lily Allen walks down the aisle seven months after losing her first child, and during his wedding speech the groom reveals she is already sixteen weeks pregnant.
"Our House" by Madness, official music video (1982). The ultimate British song about domestic chaos and love under one roof. Allen traded the London tabloid circuit for a six-bedroom house in the Cotswolds with a man the press couldn't find a single interesting fact about, and that was exactly the point.
The Builder
Sam Cooper is a builder and decorator from the West Country of England. He has never given a public interview. He doesn't have a social media presence. In the world Lily Allen came from, where everyone is performing all the time, Cooper's total lack of interest in being known was the most attractive thing about him.
“I was so lucky to have him there because there are so many women who go through it on their own and have to deal with it with no support.”
— Lily Allen on Sam Cooper during the stillbirth, The Jonathan Ross Show, November 2014
TAP TO REVEAL: What was Allen's 'house of dreams'?
St James the Great Church, Cranham, Gloucestershire
Where Allen and Cooper married on June 11, 2011, in a ceremony with fewer than a hundred guests. Her father Keith Allen walked her down the aisle. She wore a Delphine Manivet gown for the ceremony and a Chanel dress designed by Karl Lagerfeld for the reception.
Sam Cooper: The Timeline
Family Man -- Lily Allen
From No Shame (2018). Written years after the marriage ended, this track captures the tension Allen felt during the Cooper years: he wanted the stable domestic life, she was torn between motherhood and the career she'd given up. In a 2018 Cosmopolitan interview, she said Cooper "got to stay at home and have the family that I'd just spent three years making inside me" while she had to go earn the money. This song is the sound of that frustration looking back.
Family Man -- Lily Allen (2018)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Allen is writing about Cooper without naming him, and every line is loaded with the specific resentments of a woman who tried to be someone she wasn't.
What secret did Sam Cooper reveal during his wedding speech?
The wedding speech revealed a secret: Allen is pregnant again. Next: Ethel and Marnie, the two daughters who will change everything she thinks she knows about herself.
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