Singer Lily Allen has confirmed that the mysterious Madeline character on her new album is constructed from numerous people.
The 40-year-old popstar returned this week with West End Girl, her first album in seven years, which covers many knotty themes, including cheating, gaslighting, open relationships and sex addiction.
Allen herself has described the album as “a mixture of fact and fiction which I hope serves as a reminder of how stoic yet also how frail we humans can be”.
The 14-track record comes after the demise of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour.
On the songs “Tennis” and “Madeline”, Allen namechecks a woman named Madeline, whom she interrogates after seeing a text message from her appear on a partner’s phone.
Speaking to The Times, Allen told the newspaper that Madeline was “a fictional character”. When asked if she was a “construct of others”, Allen said: “Yes”.
In the same interview, Allen said that she wrote the album in just 10 days, last December, when she was “really depressed”.
“I thought I didn’t have any good songs left,” she explains. “My writing had been really bad and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, ‘Oh, here she is.’”
She added: “Traditionally in my life, when traumatic things happened, I’ve taken time to step away. I certainly don’t think I could have got up on stage days after losing a child [Allen suffered a stillbirth in 2010]. But that is probably more of an anatomical thing. And there are levels to the humiliation – right?”
In a five-star review, The Independent’s Hannah Ewens wrote: “It’s not just confessional pop, it’s obliterative; an emotional post-mortem carried out in public, a death-by-a-million-cuts account of a thoroughly modern marriage breakdown.”
Allen married Harbour in 2019 after meeting on Raya, an exclusive dating app popular among celebrities and other high-profile figures.
She revealed earlier this month that she entered a treatment facility following their separation last year as she struggled with intense feelings of despair and almost relapsed after six years of sobriety.
The singer told British Vogue that she had “wanted to die” but “feels OK” now after finding a sponsor and going to daily meetings on top of medication, therapy and antidepressants.
Over the course of her Brit Award-winning and Grammy-nominated career, Allen has released five albums: Alright, Still (2006), It’s Not Me, It’s You (2009), Sheezus (2014), No Shame (2018) andWest End Girl (2025).
In recent years, she has moved into acting, having performed in plays including 2:22: A Ghost Story, The Pillowman and Hedda.
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