BOOK EXTRACT: Confessions Of A Qantas Flight Attendant

(GayWebSource.com – Gay News & Press Network) – Posted by Jake Simpson – TheGayUK.com

WHO’S LILY ALLEN?

by Owen Beddall

On one Singapore–London flight in 2006, there was a bit of a fuss among the English first- and business-class crew: ‘Oh, my God, it’s Lily Allen!’ This was apparently a reference to the pretty young girl in the last row of business.

‘Who’s Lily Allen?’ I asked, because I’d never heard of her.

‘She’s a star!’ The Essex girls were positively frothing with excitement. I was working in first so I thought I’d wander down to business to catch a glimpse of the star. She was sitting with her assistant and had an earphone in one ear that connected with an iPod.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘The girls are all fainting in first. I hear you’re a star; what do you do?’

‘I’m a singer. I’m Lily Allen. I’m number one in the UK right now,’ she said.

I apologised for my ignorance, explaining that I was living in Brussels and commuted a lot. Later, I found out that her father was the British actor and comedian Keith Allen and her mother, Alison Owen, was a film producer.

‘Oh, my God. I don’t believe you don’t know who I am. I’m number one in Belgium too and the rest of Europe,’ she laughed, clearly finding it hilarious.

‘Well, you’ll have to let me have a listen to you on your iPod.’

She handed it over, at the same time introducing me to her record label assistant, who just happened to be the sister of William Baker, the guy who reinvented Kylie Minogue by putting her in the gold hot pants.

So that’s how I ended up preparing the first-class meals while listening to Lily’s album with her hit ‘Smile’ on it. I was quite impressed.

Later, when service was over and beds had been made up for passengers, I invited Lily up to the first-class galley for a drink and a gossip. What a delight! She was a proud Londoner and happily chatted about her life.

The conversation turned to the music industry. She told me she was returning to the UK after visiting Australia for a promotional tour – that was what an artist had to do if their first release was a hit.

‘It’s about establishing yourself internationally and creating a buzz with flow-on effects,’ she explained.

At the time Lily was twenty-one and said she was finding the whole celebrity thing pretty funny. She also told me the business was incredibly incestuous.

Although fairly new to stardom, she came across as very confident, and even had a few predictions. Amy Winehouse, she was sure, would be as big as her one day. (Of course, about a year later, Amy’s hit ‘Rehab’ made number one on the British charts; Lily didn’t predict Amy’s 2013 death following an alcohol binge, after she’d kicked drugs.) The two of them would change the Brit girl-band image, she added. That could have been a Spice Girls dig; I didn’t like to ask.

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We were having a good old laugh in the first-class galley and she asked, ‘What you gotta do to get up here?’

Quietly, I pulled aside the curtain that separated first class from business class so she could peep at the stretched-out sleeping passengers. ‘Darl, this is what you can look forward to when you have a few more number-one hits.’

To reinforce the point, I loaded her up with first-class goodies – some La Prairie cream, a bottle of Dom Perignon and some Qantas pyjamas – and told her to remember me when she was a big star. Laughingly, she said would never forget me.

As I was leaving Heathrow, I saw Lily again: she was crossing the road and getting into a waiting car. She saw me, took a swig out of the $300 bottle of Dom Perignon, and yelled, ‘Nice one, Owen!’

I blew her a kiss and headed home to bed; although I was living in Brussels I was overnighting in London. Later that afternoon, I received phone calls from two Qantas crew asking me if I’d seen the Metro newspaper, a free London publication that was read by millions.

‘My God, Owen you’re in the newspaper! Lily’s thanking you for all the first-class goodies you gave her.’

My immediate reaction was that I could lose my job – that expensive bottle of Dom alone would be grounds for dismissal! Until I could get a copy of the paper, I was sweating on it, wondering what exactly the singer had said. Management was bound to be in touch so I worked out how I’d plead my case: Lily was a rising star and I was upselling, I’d say.

When finally I read the article, which turned out to be one of several artists’ blog entries and appeared under the heading ‘They’re blog’n’roll stars’, I was relieved and pleasantly surprised. She’d written, ‘big up to Owen’ and only mentioned the pyjamas. How flattering that of all the people Lily Allen had met, she mentioned me, and she’d gone out of her way to do so.

Management didn’t call; they probably figured the publicity was good. They didn’t seem to ever realise how close we flight attendants sometimes got to passengers in a single flight and what an asset we could be.

Lily had told me that she was scheduled to appear in Brussels a few weeks later and invited me to her concert. Unfortunately, I never made it as I was on a flight to Singapore at the time. But we stayed in touch for a while and, last I heard, she now lives in LA with her husband, Sam Cooper, and two children. Lily has recently come out of self-imposed retirement and is notching up number-one hits again; she had two songs in the UK Top 10 at the end of November 2013.

Extracted from Confessions of a Qantas Flight Attendant: True Tales and Gossip From The Galley by Owen Beddall with Libby Harkness. Reprinted by permission of Random House Australia.

Available now from bookstores and online retailers: http://www.randomhouse.com.au/qantasconfessions

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