Look up true in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

True may refer to:

• Truth, the state of being in accord with fact or reality

Arts and entertainment[link]

Music[link]

• True (L'Arc-en-Ciel album), 1996
• True (Mika Nakashima album), 2002
• True (Spandau Ballet album), 1983
  • "True" (Spandau Ballet song)
• True (TrinityRoots album), 2001
• True (TRU album), 1995
• "True" (George Strait song), 1998
• "True" (Ryan Cabrera song), 2004
• "True...", a 2001 song by Riyu Kosaka
• "True", a 2009 song by Brandy Norwood from Human
• "True", a 1987 song by Concrete Blonde from Concrete Blonde
• "True", a 2005 song by Zion I from True & Livin'
• "True Song", a 2002 song by Do As Infinity

Other media[link]

• True (magazine), an American men's magazine
  • GE True, an anthology TV series based on stories from True magazine
• Trace (magazine), formerly True, a British hip-hop magazine
• True (film), a short film directed by Tom Tykwer, starring Natalie Portman

Businesses, organizations and products[link]

• True (cigarette), a brand of cigarettes made by Lorillard Tobacco Company
• True (dating service), an online dating service
• True Corporation, a Thai communications group
• Transit Riders' Union of Edmonton, a Canadian social action group
• Trust for Urban Ecology, a UK ecological organisation

Computing[link]

• true (Unix), a Unix utility
• true, a boolean value
• TRUE (Temporal Reasoning Universal Elaboration), a discrete and continuous time simulation software program for 2D, 3D and 4D modeling

People[link]

• Alfred Charles True, American educator and agriculturist
• Allen Tupper True, American artist
• Andrea True, American pornographic actress and disco singer
• Arnold E. True, American naval officer
• Charles Kittredge True, American clergyman
• Clarence True, American architect
• Delbert Leroy True, American archaeologist
• Everett True, British music journalist
• Frederick W. True, American biologist
• Katie True, American politician
• Laurel True, American artist
• Marion True, American curator
• Rachel True, American actress
• Ronald True, English murderer
• Steve True, American sportscaster
• TRUE, American artist

Places[link]

• True, West Virginia, U.S.
• True, Wisconsin, U.S.

See also[link]

• TRU (group), an American hip hop group
• True self
• Truth value, in logic and mathematics, a logical value

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

This article contains instructions, advice, or how-to content. The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to train. Please help improve this article either by rewriting the how-to content or by moving it to Wikiversity or Wikibooks. (July 2011)

Text file created with gedit and viewed with a hex editor
Besides the text objects there are only EOL markers
with the hexadecimal value 0A.

In computing, a newline,^[1] also known as a line break or end-of-line (EOL) marker, is a special character or sequence of characters signifying the end of a line of text. The name comes from the fact that the next character after the newline will appear on a new line—that is, on the next line below the text immediately preceding the newline. The actual codes representing a newline vary across operating systems, which can be a problem when exchanging text files between systems with different newline representations.

There is also some confusion whether newlines terminate or separate lines. If a newline is considered a separator, there will be no newline after the last line of a file. The general convention on most systems is to add a newline even after the last line, i.e. to treat newline as a line terminator. Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it is not newline terminated. Conversely, programs that expect newline to be used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new (empty) line.

In text intended primarily to be read by humans using software which implements the word wrap feature, a newline character typically only needs to be stored if a line break is required independent of whether the next word would fit on the same line, such as between paragraphs and in vertical lists. See hard return and soft return.

Representations[link]

Software applications and operating systems usually represent a newline with one or two control characters:

• Systems based on ASCII or a compatible character set use either LF (Line feed, '\n', 0x0A, 10 in decimal) or CR (Carriage return, '\r', 0x0D, 13 in decimal) individually, or CR followed by LF (CR+LF, '\r\n', 0x0D0A). These characters are based on printer commands: The line feed indicated that one line of paper should feed out of the printer thus instructed the printer to advance the paper one line, and a carriage return indicated that the printer carriage should return to the beginning of the current line. Some rare systems, such as QNX before version 4, used the ASCII RS (record separator, 0x1E, 30 in decimal) character as the newline character.
  • LF:    Multics, Unix and Unix-like systems (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, AIX, Xenix, etc.), BeOS, Amiga, RISC OS and others.
  • CR+LF: Microsoft Windows, DEC TOPS-10, RT-11 and most other early non-Unix and non-IBM OSes, CP/M, MP/M, DOS (MS-DOS, PC-DOS, etc.), Atari TOS, OS/2, Symbian OS, Palm OS
  • LF+CR: Acorn BBC and RISC OS spooled text output.
  • CR:    Commodore 8-bit machines, Acorn BBC, TRS-80, Apple II family, Mac OS up to version 9 and OS-9
  • RS:    QNX pre-POSIX implementation.
• EBCDIC systems—mainly IBM mainframe systems, including z/OS (OS/390) and i5/OS (OS/400)—use NEL (Next Line, 0x15) as the newline character. Note that EBCDIC also has control characters called CR and LF, but the numerical value of LF (0x25) differs from the one used by ASCII (0x0A). Additionally, there are some EBCDIC variants that also use NEL but assign a different numeric code to the character.
• Operating systems for the CDC 6000 series defined a newline as two or more zero-valued six-bit characters at the end of a 60-bit word. Some configurations also defined a zero-valued character as a colon character, with the result that multiple colons could be interpreted as a newline depending on position.
• ZX80 and ZX81, home computers from Sinclair Research Ltd used a specific non-ASCII character set with code NEWLINE (0x76, 118 decimal) as the newline character.
• OpenVMS uses a record-based file system, which stores text files as one record per line. In most file formats, no line terminators are actually stored, but the Record Management Services facility can transparently add a terminator to each line when it is retrieved by an application. The records themselves could contain the same line terminator characters, which could either be considered a feature or a nuisance depending on the application.
• Fixed line length was used by some early mainframe operating systems. In such a system, an implicit end-of-line was assumed every 80 characters, for example. No newline character was stored. If a file was imported from the outside world, lines shorter than the line length had to be padded with spaces, while lines longer than the line length had to be truncated. This mimicked the use of punched cards, on which each line was stored on a separate card, usually with 80 columns on each card. Many of these systems added an carriage control character to the start of the next record, this could indicate if the next record was a continuation of the line started by the previous record, or a new line, or should overprint the previous line (similar to a CR). Often this was a normal printing character such as '#' that thus could not be used as the first character in a line. Some early line printers interpreted these characters directly in the records sent to them.

Most textual Internet protocols (including HTTP, SMTP, FTP, IRC and many others) mandate the use of ASCII CR+LF (0x0D 0x0A) on the protocol level, but recommend that tolerant applications recognize lone LF as well. In practice, there are many applications that erroneously use the C newline character '\n' instead (see section Newline in programming languages below). This leads to problems when trying to communicate with systems adhering to a stricter interpretation of the standards; one such system is the qmail MTA that actively refuses to accept messages from systems that send bare LF instead of the required CR+LF.^[2]

FTP has a feature to transform newlines between CR+LF and LF only when transferring text files. This must not be used on binary files. Usually binary files and text files are recognised by checking their filename extension.

Unicode[link]

The Unicode standard defines a large number of characters that conforming applications should recognize as line terminators:^[3]

 LF:    Line Feed, U+000A
 VT:    Vertical Tab, U+000B
 FF:    Form Feed, U+000C
 CR:    Carriage Return, U+000D
 CR+LF: CR (U+000D) followed by LF (U+000A)
 NEL:   Next Line, U+0085
 LS:    Line Separator, U+2028
 PS:    Paragraph Separator, U+2029

This may seem overly complicated compared to an approach such as converting all line terminators to a single character, for example LF. However, Unicode was designed to preserve all information when converting a text file from any existing encoding to Unicode and back. Therefore, Unicode should contain characters included in existing encodings. NEL is included in ISO-8859-1^{[citation needed]} and EBCDIC (0x15). The approach taken in the Unicode standard allows round-trip transformation to be information-preserving while still enabling applications to recognize all possible types of line terminators.

Recognizing and using the newline codes greater than 0x7F is not often done. They are multiple bytes in UTF-8 and the code for NEL has been used as the ellipsis ('…') character in Windows-1252. For instance:

• YAML^[4] no longer recognizes them as special in order to be compatible with JSON.
• ECMAScript^[5] accepts LS and PS as line breaks, but considers U+0085 (NEL) white space, not a line break.
• Microsoft Windows 2000 does not treat any of NEL, LS or PS as line-break in the default text editor Notepad
• In Linux, a popular editor "gedit" treats LS and PS as newlines but does not for NEL.

History[link]

ASCII was developed simultaneously by the ISO and the ASA, the predecessor organization to ANSI. During the period of 1963–1968, the ISO draft standards supported the use of either CR+LF or LF alone as a newline, while the ASA drafts supported only CR+LF.

The sequence CR+LF was in common use on many early computer systems that had adopted Teletype machines, typically a Teletype Model 33 ASR, as a console device, because this sequence was required to position those printers at the start of a new line. On these systems, text was often routinely composed to be compatible with these printers, since the concept of device drivers hiding such hardware details from the application was not yet well developed; applications had to talk directly to the Teletype machine and follow its conventions.

Most minicomputer systems from DEC used this convention. CP/M used it as well, to print on the same terminals that minicomputers used. From there MS-DOS (1981) adopted CP/M's CR+LF in order to be compatible, and this convention was inherited by Microsoft's later Windows operating system.

The separation of the two functions concealed the fact that the print head could not return from the far right to the beginning of the next line in one-character time. That is why the sequence was always sent with the CR first. In fact, it was often necessary to send extra characters (extraneous CRs or NULs, which are ignored) to give the print head time to move to the left margin. Even many early video displays required multiple character times to scroll the display.

The Multics operating system began development in 1964 and used LF alone as its newline. Multics used a device driver to translate this character to whatever sequence a printer needed (including extra padding characters), and the single byte was much more convenient for programming. The seemingly more obvious choice of CR was not used, as a plain CR provided the useful function of overprinting one line with another, and thus it was useful to not translate it. Unix followed the Multics practice, and later systems followed Unix.

In programming languages[link]

To facilitate the creation of portable programs, programming languages provide some abstractions to deal with the different types of newline sequences used in different environments.

The C programming language provides the escape sequences '\n' (newline) and '\r' (carriage return). However, these are not required to be equivalent to the ASCII LF and CR control characters. The C standard only guarantees two things:

1. Each of these escape sequences maps to a unique implementation-defined number that can be stored in a single char value.
2. When writing a file in text mode, '\n' is transparently translated to the native newline sequence used by the system, which may be longer than one character. When reading in text mode, the native newline sequence is translated back to '\n'. In binary mode, no translation is performed, and the internal representation produced by '\n' is output directly.

On Unix platforms, where C originated, the native newline sequence is ASCII LF (0x0A), so '\n' was simply defined to be that value. With the internal and external representation being identical, the translation performed in text mode is a no-op, and text mode and binary mode behave the same. This has caused many programmers who developed their software on Unix systems simply to ignore the distinction completely, resulting in code that is not portable to different platforms.

The C library function fgets() is best avoided in binary mode because any file not written with the UNIX newline convention will be misread. Also, in text mode, any file not written with the system's native newline sequence (such as a file created on a UNIX system, then copied to a Windows system) will be misread as well.

Another common problem is the use of '\n' when communicating using an Internet protocol that mandates the use of ASCII CR+LF for ending lines. Writing '\n' to a text mode stream works correctly on Windows systems, but produces only LF on Unix, and something completely different on more exotic systems. Using "\r\n" in binary mode is slightly better.

Many languages, such as C++, Perl,^[6] and Haskell provide the same interpretation of '\n' as C.

Java, PHP,^[7] and Python^[8] provide the '\r\n' sequence (for ASCII CR+LF). In contrast to C, these are guaranteed to represent the values U+000A and U+000D, respectively.

The Java I/O libraries do not transparently translate these into platform-dependent newline sequences on input or output. Instead, they provide functions for writing a full line that automatically add the native newline sequence, and functions for reading lines that accept any of CR, LF, or CR+LF as a line terminator (see BufferedReader.readLine()). The System.getProperty() method can be used to retrieve the underlying line separator.

Example:

  String eol = System.getProperty( "line.separator" );
  String lineColor = "Color: Red" + eol;

Python permits "Universal Newline Support" when opening a file for reading, when importing modules, and when executing a file.^[9]

Some languages have created special variables, constants, and subroutines to facilitate newlines during program execution.

Common problems[link]

The different newline conventions often cause text files that have been transferred between systems of different types to be displayed incorrectly. For example, files originating on Unix or Apple Macintosh systems may appear as a single long line on some Windows programs. Conversely, when viewing a file originating from a Windows computer on a Unix system, the extra CR may be displayed as ^M at the end of each line or as a second line break.

The problem can be hard to spot if some programs handle the foreign newlines properly while others do not. For example, a compiler may fail with obscure syntax errors even though the source file looks correct when displayed on the console or in an editor. On a Unix system, the command cat -v myfile.txt will send the file to stdout (normally the terminal) and make the ^M visible, which can be useful for debugging. Modern text editors generally recognize all flavours of CR / LF newlines and allow the user to convert between the different standards. Web browsers are usually also capable of displaying text files and websites which use different types of newlines.

The File Transfer Protocol can automatically convert newlines in files being transferred between systems with different newline representations when the transfer is done in "ASCII mode". However, transferring binary files in this mode usually has disastrous results: Any occurrence of the newline byte sequence—which does not have line terminator semantics in this context, but is just part of a normal sequence of bytes—will be translated to whatever newline representation the other system uses, effectively corrupting the file. FTP clients often employ some heuristics (for example, inspection of filename extensions) to automatically select either binary or ASCII mode, but in the end it is up to the user to make sure his or her files are transferred in the correct mode. If there is any doubt as to the correct mode, binary mode should be used, as then no files will be altered by FTP, though they may display incorrectly.

Conversion utilities[link]

This article contains instructions, advice, or how-to content. The purpose of Wikipedia is to present facts, not to train. Please help improve this article either by rewriting the how-to content or by moving it to Wikiversity or Wikibooks. (June 2010)

Text editors are often used for converting a text file between different newline formats; most modern editors can read and write files using at least the different ASCII CR/LF conventions. The standard Windows editor Notepad is not one of them (although Wordpad and the MS-DOS Editor are).

Editors are often unsuitable for converting larger files. For larger files (on Windows NT/2000/XP) the following command is often used:

TYPE unix_file | FIND "" /V > dos_file

On many Unix systems, the dos2unix (sometimes named fromdos or d2u) and unix2dos (sometimes named todos or u2d) utilities are used to translate between ASCII CR+LF (DOS/Windows) and LF (Unix) newlines. Different versions of these commands vary slightly in their syntax. However, the tr command is available on virtually every Unix-like system and is used to perform arbitrary replacement operations on single characters. A DOS/Windows text file can be converted to Unix format by simply removing all ASCII CR characters with

tr -d '\r' < inputfile > outputfile

or, if the text has only CR newlines, by converting all CR newlines to LF with

tr '\r' '\n' < inputfile > outputfile

The same tasks are sometimes performed with awk, sed, Tr_(Unix) or in Perl if the platform has a Perl interpreter:

awk '{sub("$","\r\n"); printf("%s",$0);}' inputfile > outputfile  # UNIX to DOS  (adding CRs on Linux and BSD based OS that haven't GNU extensions)
awk '{gsub("\r",""); print;}' inputfile > outputfile              # DOS to UNIX  (removing CRs on Linux and BSD based OS that haven't GNU extensions)
sed -e 's/$/\r/' inputfile > outputfile              # UNIX to DOS  (adding CRs on Linux based OS that use GNU extensions)
sed -e 's/\r$//' inputfile > outputfile              # DOS  to UNIX (removing CRs on Linux based OS that use GNU extensions)
cat inputfile | tr -d "\r" > outputfile              # DOS  to UNIX (removing CRs using tr(1). Not Unicode compliant.)
perl -pe 's/\r?\n|\r/\r\n/g' inputfile > outputfile  # Convert to DOS
perl -pe 's/\r?\n|\r/\n/g'   inputfile > outputfile  # Convert to UNIX
perl -pe 's/\r?\n|\r/\r/g'   inputfile > outputfile  # Convert to old Mac

To identify what type of line breaks a text file contains, the file command can be used. Moreover, the editor Vim can be convenient to make a file compatible with the Windows notepad text editor. For example:

[prompt] > file myfile.txt
myfile.txt: ASCII English text
[prompt] > vim myfile.txt
  within vim :set fileformat=dos
             :wq
[prompt] > file myfile.txt
myfile.txt: ASCII English text, with CRLF line terminators

The following grep commands echo the filename (in this case myfile.txt) to the command line if the file is of the specified style:

grep -PL $'\r\n' myfile.txt # show UNIX style file (LF terminated)
grep -Pl $'\r\n' myfile.txt # show DOS style file (CRLF terminated)

For Debian-based systems, these commands are used:

egrep -L $'\r\n' myfile.txt # show UNIX style file (LF terminated)
egrep -l $'\r\n' myfile.txt # show DOS style file (CRLF terminated)

The above grep commands work under Unix systems or in Cygwin under Windows. Note that these commands make some assumptions about the kinds of files that exist on the system (specifically it's assuming only UNIX and DOS-style files—no Mac OS 9-style files).

This technique is often combined with find to list files recursively. For instance, the following command checks all "regular files" (e.g. it will exclude directories, symbolic links, etc.) to find all UNIX-style files in a directory tree, starting from the current directory (.), and saves the results in file unix_files.txt, overwriting it if the file already exists:

find . -type f -exec grep -PL '\r\n' {} \; > unix_files.txt

This example will find C files and convert them to LF style line endings:

find -name '*.[ch]' -exec fromdos {} \;

The file command also detects the type of EOL used:

file myfile.txt
> myfile.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

Other tools permit the user to visualise the EOL characters:

od -a myfile.txt
cat -e myfile.txt
hexdump -c myfile.txt

dos2unix, unix2dos, mac2unix, unix2mac, mac2dos, dos2mac can perform conversions. The flip^[10] command is often used.

See also[link]

• ASA carriage control characters
• C0 and C1 control codes
• Page break
• Line starve

References[link]

External links[link]

• The Unicode reference, see paragraph 5.8 in Chapter 5 of the Unicode 4.0 standard (PDF)
• "The End-of-Line Story"
• The [NEL] Newline Character
• The End of Line Puzzle
• Tofrodos - software for Unix that converts to and from DOS newlines
• ToFroWin: a Windows shell extension that is able to convert multiple files from DOS to UNIX (and vice-versa) line endings right from the context menu.
• "Understanding Newlines" on O'Reilly-Net - an article by Xavier Noria.

Lily Allen
Background information
Birth name	Lily Rose Beatrice Allen
Born	(1985-05-02) 2 May 1985 (age 27) Hammersmith, London, England
Genres	Pop
Occupations	Musician, songwriter, presenter, actress
Instruments	Vocals, guitar[1]
Years active	2002–present
Labels	London, Regal, Capitol
Website	lilyallenmusic.com

Lily Rose Beatrice Cooper^[2] (born 2 May 1985), better known as Lily Allen, is an English recording artist, actress and fashion designer. She is the daughter of actor and musician Keith Allen and film producer Alison Owen. In her teenage years, her musical tastes evolved from glam rock to alternative. Allen abandoned school and concentrated on improving her performing and compositional skills. Afterwards, she created several demo songs and, near the end of 2005, she created a profile on MySpace where she made some of her recordings public.

A contract was signed with the label Regal Recordings, as the views on MySpace rose to tens of thousands. In 2006, she began to work on completing what would be her first studio album and its first mainstream single "Smile" reached the top position on the UK Singles Chart in July 2006.^[3] Her debut record, Alright, Still, was well received on the international market, selling over 2.6 million copies and brought Allen a nomination at the Grammy Awards, BRIT Awards and MTV Video Music Awards. She then began hosting her own talk-show, Lily Allen and Friends, on BBC Three.

Her second major album release, It's Not Me, It's You, saw a genre shift for her, having more of an electropop feel, rather than the ska and reggae influences of the first one. The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and the Australian ARIA Charts and was appreciated by the critics, noting the singer's musical evolution and maturity. It spawned the hit singles "The Fear" and "Fuck You", popular mostly in Europe. Allen and Amy Winehouse have been credited with starting a process that led to the media-proclaimed "year of the women" in 2009 that has seen five female artists making music of "experimentalism and fearlessness" nominated for the Mercury Prize.^[4]

During the autumn of 2010, Allen opened a fashion rental shop "Lucy in Disguise" with her sister Sarah,^[5][6] followed by the 2011 launching of her own record label.^[7]

Life and career[link]

Childhood and youth[link]

Allen was born in Hammersmith, west London, daughter of Welsh-born comedian and actor Keith Allen and English, Portsmouth-born, film producer Alison Owen.^[8] She has an older sister, Sarah; a younger brother, Alfie Owen-Allen (who was the subject of her song "Alfie"); and a younger sister Rebecca.^{[citation needed]} She has a number of half-siblings. At the age of three, Allen appeared on The Comic Strip Presents... episode "The Yob",^[9] which her father had co-written.^[10] When Allen was four years old, her father left the family.^[11] Allen grew up with her mother living on a council estate during her early childhood.^[12][13] Her family settled in the North London borough of Islington. Allen lived for a while with comedian Harry Enfield while her mother dated him. She is the god-daughter of Wild Colonials vocalist Angela McCluskey.^[14] The late Clash singer and guitarist Joe Strummer was close to Allen. Allen has fond memories of the week and a half they would spend together at Glastonbury Festival as part of a regular collective centred on Strummer and her father. Strummer's musical past would not come into focus for Allen until after his death.^[15]

She attended some of the UK's most expensive fee-paying public schools; Allen attended 13 schools in all, including Prince Charles's junior alma mater, Hill House School, Millfield, Bedales School^[11] and was expelled from several of them for drinking and smoking.^[13][16] When Allen was 11, former University of Victoria music student Rachel Santesso overheard Allen singing Wonderwall by Oasis in the school's playground; impressed, Santesso, who later became an award-winning soprano and composer, called Allen into her office the next day and started giving her lunchtime singing lessons. This would lead to Allen singing Baby Mine from Disney's Dumbo at a school concert.^[17] Allen would tell Loveline that the audience was "brought to tears at the sight of a troubled young girl doing something good". At that point Allen said she knew that music was something she needed to do either as a lifelong vocation or to get it out of her system. Allen played piano to grade 5 standard and achieved Grade 8 in singing. She also played violin, guitar and trumpet as well as being a member of a chamber choir. Her first solo was "In the Bleak Midwinter."^[15] Allen made an appearance as a lady-in-waiting in the 1998 film Elizabeth, which was co-produced by her mother.^[18] She dropped out of school at age fifteen, not wanting to "spend a third of her life preparing to work for the next third of her life, to set herself up with a pension for the next third of her life."^[19]

2002–05: Career beginnings[link]

When her family went to Ibiza on holiday, Allen told her mother that she was staying with friends but remained in Sant Antoni de Portmany instead. She earned money by working at a Plastic Fantastic record store and dealing ecstasy.^[19] Allen met her first manager, George Lamb in Ibiza.^[19][20] She was rejected by several labels, which she attributed to her drinking and being the daughter of Keith Allen.^[20] However, she eventually used her father's connections to get signed to London Records in 2002.^[21] When the executive who had signed her left, the label lost interest and she left without releasing the folk songs^[which?] many of which were written by her father.^[15][21][22] She then studied horticulture to become a florist, but changed her mind and returned to music. Allen began writing songs, while her manager introduced her to production duo Future Cut in 2004. They worked in a small studio in the basement of an office building.^[22]

In 2005, Allen was signed to Regal Recordings; they gave her £25,000 to produce an album, though they were unable to provide much support for it due to their preoccupation with other releases such as X&Y (Coldplay) and Demon Days (Gorillaz).^[23] Allen then created an account on MySpace and began posting demos that she recorded in November 2005.^[23] The demos attracted thousands of listeners, and 500 limited edition 7" vinyl singles of "LDN" were rush-released, reselling for as much as £40.^[19][23] Allen also produced two mixtapes — My First Mixtape and My Second Mixtape — to promote her work. As she accumulated tens of thousands of MySpace friends, The Observer Music Monthly (OMM), a magazine published in The Observer, took interest in March 2006.^[19] Few people outside of her label's A&R department knew who she was, so the label was slow in responding to publications wanting to report about her.^[23] She received her first major mainstream coverage, appearing in the magazine's cover story two months later.

[edit] 2006–08: Alright, Still and television

The success convinced her label to allow her more creative control over the album and to use some of the songs that she had written instead of forcing her to work with mainstream producers. Allen decided to work with producers Greg Kurstin and Mark Ronson, finishing the rest of the album in two weeks.^[23] Allen's debut album, Alright, Still, was released in July 2006. Most of the tracks had been previewed on her MySpace page,^[24] including the singles "Smile", "LDN", "Knock 'Em Out", and "Alfie". In September 2006, "Smile" was made available on the United States version of iTunes Store. By December 2006, her music video for Smile had been played on various music channels as well as the song getting a little airplay. Entertainment Weekly named Alright, Still as one of the top 10 albums of 2006 despite the fact that it had not yet been released in the U.S. Allen also did several promotional ads for MTV as their Discover and Download artist of the month for January 2007. The album was released in the United States on 30 January 2007, landing at 20 on the Billboard Album Charts.^[25] By January 2009, the album had sold 960,000 copies in the United Kingdom and 520,000 copies in the United States.^[26]

Performing at "Solidays" on 7 July 2007

In 2007, she played the newly launched Park Stage at the Glastonbury Festival, replacing M.I.A. who had cancelled.^[27] During the festival she reunited two members of The Specials an act that guitarist Lynval Golding claimed played a "massive part" in the group's 2009 reunion.^[28] She also sang the vocals on the top ten single, "Oh My God", a cover of the Kaiser Chiefs song by Mark Ronson. The single, "Littlest Things" from Allen's album produced by Ronson, helped earn him a "Producer of the Year – Non Classical" 2008 Grammy Award.^[29] She also provided background vocals to a couple of songs on the Kaiser Chief's third album in 2008. Allen won a 2008 BMI songwriting award for "Smile".^[30] Allen began dating musician Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers in September 2007, and in December, Allen announced that she and Simons were expecting a child.^[31] Allen suffered a miscarriage in January 2008.^[32]

Due to her outspokenness, Allen was the subject of many controversies early in her career. Disparaging remarks about musicians Luke Pritchard of The Kooks, Bob Geldof,^[33] Amy Winehouse,^[34] Kylie Minogue,^[35] and Katy Perry^[36] have all garnered minor press attention. She later said that making fun of other pop stars was a result of a lack of confidence, saying "I felt like 'Oh God, I'm short, fat, ugly and I hate all these people who flaunt their beauty.'"^[37] On 28 June 2007, Allen was arrested in London for allegedly assaulting photographer Kevin Rush while she was leaving a nightclub in London's West End. Prior to this, she had expressed discomfort with attention from the paparazzi on her MySpace blog.^[38] By February 2009 she had stopped addressing controversies about herself on her blog because she found it "boring when people just pick stuff up and write about it. People get hurt, people get upset."^[39] In September 2009, she shut down her MySpace account and stopped social networking completely in December due to the abuse she was taking.^[40]

Allen signed a one series contract to present her own BBC Three TV show entitled Lily Allen and Friends based on the social networking phenomenon that helped to launch her music career.^[41][42][43] Guests included Mark Ronson, Joanna Page, James Corden, Lauren Laverne, Roisin Murphy, Louis Walsh, and Danny Dyer.^[44][45] The show received a 2% share of the total multi-channel audience share despite a high-profile nationwide marketing campaign.^[46] Allen was quoted in a British tabloid as rating the show "probably five out of 10" and said "I made a lot of money out of it".^[47] Citing Allen's rapid development as a TV host and her popularity among its target audience BBC Three announced it was renewing Lily Allen and Friends for a second season.^[48] BBC Three controller Danny Cohen later said that the show will not air in the Spring of 2009 as originally scheduled because of music commitments.^[49]

Allen performed at a benefit concert for War Child, an international child protection agency that works with children affected by war. Backed by Keane, Allen sang "Smile" and "Everybody’s Changing".^[50] Although the singer is a staunch supporter of the Labour Party,^[51] she has been credited with helping inspire a parliamentary rebellion against Prime Minister Gordon Brown when she wrote to all Members of Parliament asking them to back an amendment to an energy bill.^[52] She has since confirmed her support for the UK Labour Party and for Prime Minister Gordon Brown in particular.^[53]

[edit] 2008–09: It's Not Me, It's You

After the release of her first album, her parent record company, EMI, was taken over by Terra Firma.^[54] She also changed her management company from Empire Artist Management to Twenty-First Artists, although her core team remained in place. At the urging of her record company, Allen tried unsuccessfully to create the album with several writers and producers. Allen eventually returned to Greg Kurstin who had written three songs for Alright, Still.^[15] The album was produced by Kurstin at Eagle Rock Studios in Los Angeles.^[55] Before returning to Kus, Allen co-wrote the songs for the album with Kurstin who played piano on it. This is a change from her earlier work in which she wrote lyrics for finished tracks.^[56] Allen released a statement saying "We decided to try and make bigger sounding, more ethereal songs, real songs ... I wanted to work with one person from start to finish to make it one body of work. I wanted it to feel like it had some sort of integrity. I think I've grown up a bit as a person and I hope it reflects that."^[55] She posted two new song demos on her MySpace page and planned to release a mixtape to give her fans an idea of what the new direction was.^{[57][58][59][60][61][62]}