LILY ALLEN sounds wary. "You're not going to ask me any questions about S Club 7, are you?" For the previous hour, Allen has fielded calls from a couple of Thai journalists. Some frank comments previously made by Allen about her dislike for Steps and S Club 7 have upset the Thai music-writing folk and they were seeking revenge.

A hungover Allen coped as best she could with these queries but, obviously, she now wants to make sure there won't be a repeat of this scenario. She is reassured that there will be nothing of the sort and there's a sigh of relief from the singer.

After all, she has her hands full as it is without having to defend her views on pop muppets. Her debut album only goes on release this week, yet Allen's rapid rise to prominence has already seen charges and accusations, from nepotism to hype, levelled at the 21-year-old.

However, what few of her accusers have actually bothered to do is listen to the Allen's music. Alright, Still is an exceptionally bright and bubbly debut album. It has songs which are cheeky and giddy, lines which are as sharp as a number one crop and sounds lifted from the Caribbean carnival grooving its way down the street. Anyone who can rhyme "Kate Moss" with "weight loss" must have a bit of cop-on and Allen seems to have cop-on galore.

Aside from lyrical dexterity and bubblegum melodies, Allen's musical palette is particularly noteworthy. There's more calypso, ska, reggae and New Orleans blues here than you'd ever associate with a big-ticket pop album.

Allen puts it down to her 'hood. "I grew up in west London in Shepherd's Bush, near Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, and there's a huge Jamaican and West Indian culture in those areas, so some of it comes from that. But my mum was a huge Specials and Madness and Selecter fan and that rubbed off on me as well." Then, there's her fondness for the top-drawer ska and rocksteady selections of noted London DJ and promoter Gaz Mayall. "He runs this amazing club night called Gaz's Rockin' Blues and I used to go there and he'd play the most fantastic stuff," she recalls. "Actually, one of my favourite memories is of being at Glastonbury nearly every year and being at a campfire with my dad and my dad's friends with a sound system blaring old ska music and Gaz Mayall's tapes."

Her dad is Keith Allen, the noted Britpop comedian, actor and Fat Les mischief-maker. Naturally, it was assumed that young Allen's success may have owed something to old Allen's showbiz connections (not to mention the contacts book of film producer mum Alison Owen).

She disparages this claim. "He had nothing to do with me getting this record deal or writing these songs, you know," she says forcefully. "He's not involved in what I do at all and I don't think he's even met my management or my record label." But she did have a previous deal with Warners and that, she admits, was arranged by her dad. Then, Allen was just a young kid who wanted to be in the music industry and her dad decided to help out. "I made that first record about five or six years ago when I was signed to Warners. I didn't write any of it and I didn't like how it turned out. I took about three years off after that before I decided I wanted to do music properly."

Those three years off saw Allen cramming more into her life than seems possible. "I think I grew up very quickly because of all the shit I had to go through," she says of this period. She spent time ducking and diving in Ibiza ("there were a few sticky situations," she says with a giggle), having a nervous breakdown and travelling around South-East Asia on her own ("more sticky situations") before coming home.

It was at that point that Allen decided she still wanted to do music. "I knew I wanted to sing and I had this manager bloke who kick-started me into action. He told me one day that I would never make any money unless I wrote my own songs, so I thought I'd better start writing."

She headed to Manchester where she hooked up with the Future Cut production team. "The first song I ever wrote was Smile and that was two-and-a-half years ago. I'd never written before then and I was petrified when it came time to play the song to others. I didn't want to tell them that it was the first song I had ever done because I was trying to be, you know, cool and tough. I didn't know if it was any good or not so that made me even more nervous. It was really embarrassing too, because the First Cut boys were talking about bridges and middle eights and I just didn't have a clue what they were on about. Still don't, to be honest."

When Allen had her songs ready, she uploaded them to her MySpace site alongside her forthright blogs and word began to spread about her. It was, she says, as simple as that. Now, of course, she has this silly "queen of MySpace" tag hanging around her neck.

She insists she's not a poster girl for the social networking site. "Yes, OK, I've done really, really well on MySpace, but I haven't done really well just because of MySpace," she points out. "People don't keep coming back to your page or tell other people about you just because you have a pretty page. They come back because of the music they're hearing. I see it as a 21st-century record shop where, if you're someone new, you can get heard. If you have good music, people will come back for more."

These days, Allen is finding herself on stages singing her songs rather than just sticking them on a webpage. "I avoided doing live shows as long as I could because I was really unconfident about it," she says. "I was a bundle of nerves before the early shows because I didn't have enough songs. I even seriously considered just staying as a studio artist. But because of the fans I've found through MySpace, people were coming along and they knew all the words to the songs. I think I could have been rubbish live and people would still have enjoyed it."

Thus speaks a lass with a sound head on her shoulders and feet firmly planted on the ground. Allen knows it's all just beginning and anything could happen. "I feel pretty confident about it all but don't forget, no-one has bought my album yet." That's changing now.

Alright, Still is out now on Regal/EMI