Inside Lily Allen’s Dating History and Marriage History: Ex-Husband David Harbour and More

Rumors swirled in the British press for nearly a decade that Allen hooked up with Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher on an airplane while he was still married to his ex-wife Nicole Appleton. (Gallagher and Appleton were married from 2008 to 2014, and they share a son, Gene Gallagher.)

Appleton seemingly lent credence to the accusations by tweeting in April 2018: “One day our paths will cross @lilyallen!”

Allen initially attempted to downplay the airplane hookup rumors when asked about them by The Guardian in May 2018.

“I mean, I haven’t said one thing [to suggest that]. I literally have never said anything.” she insisted. “Nine years ago, they first tried to print this story, and I didn’t say anything then. And now Nicole Appleton, bless her, she’s reacted to it, so that’s made it seem real. Now my Twitter feed is: ‘Oh, stupid attention seeker, she just wants another minute in the limelight.’ But I literally haven’t said anything. I haven’t even liked a tweet. Nothing.”

However, Allen eventually claimed in her memoir My Thoughts Exactly that she did hook up with Gallagher while they were traveling to the FujiRocks festival in 2009.

“We got hammered on the plane,” she recalled. “At some point Liam and I found ourselves together in the toilet doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing, and it wasn’t drugs. Then we were in a lie-down bed together. When we landed in Tokyo, Liam said, in his distinctive nasal twang, ‘What you doing now? Why don’t you come back to our hotel’  …  I was like, ‘Yeah, OK.’”

Allen insisted that she was not aware that Gallagher was married until after they’d already hooked up in Tokyo.

“It wasn’t until the next day when he said something like, ‘No one can hear about this because of Nic,’ that I clocked he was married,” she wrote. “I knew [Liam’s brother] Noel [Gallagher] was married and I knew Liam had been married to Patsy Kensit. That was partly why I fancied him. I’d grown up an Oasis fan. I was 12 when he and Patsy Kensit were on the cover of Vanity Fair as the coolest couple.”

In her autobiography, the “LDN” musician described an awkward situation that took place months later when Gallagher surprised her on the phone with Appleton.

“Six months later I was in my car with my driver when the phone rang. . .  It was Liam,’ she wrote in her memoir. “He sounded awful, like he’d been up all night. ‘Lil,’ he said. ‘I just need you to get on the phone. I’ve got Nic here. One of your mates is, like, trying to do a wind-up or something and saying that you and me had it off or whatever, and I need you to speak to Nic and say that it’s all bollocks.’”

Allen went on: “[I said,] ‘Oh, Liam, yes sure, it’s all bollocks. Let’s say it’s all bollocks — of course I’ll tell Nicole that it’s all bollocks if that’s what you want — and not think about it too much or even at all, and then maybe it will go away and not disrupt what really matters: The people we love and rely on.’”

Gallagher has never publicly commented on the allegations.

Sam Cooper