Hell hath no fury like a Lily Allen scorned. Her new album, West End Girl, is a an instant hit, reminding us that at 40 she’s still the queen of British pop. It’s also a thorough evisceration of her feelings about the breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things star David Harbour. Although, for legal reasons, it’s not the unvarnished truth but autofiction — blending facts from her life with fictional characters. It’s all art, and Allen is a master artist.
Where Taylor Swift likes to drop Easter eggs, Allen is the whole damn Easter bunny, dropping a basket of headlines directly into fans, gossipers and journalist’s lap. There’s not much to decode here, she’s laid out a whole story from start to finish. And because her marriage was so high profile, anyone who keeps up with celebrity news knows exactly when and where everyone was when everything went down. But as she told Vogue, in between she showing off her new boob job to a suitably impressed interviewer, you can’t take her words in the lyrics as “gospel”.
West End Girl, the opening and title track, is a fairytale gone wrong. A couple move to New York and go house hunting — “You've found us a brownstone, said ‘You want it? It’s yours’” — and start decorating. Everyone was appropriately awed by Architectural Digest’s coverage of Allen and Harbour’s two-year renovation of their Brooklyn with interiors by Billy Cotton (who, funnily enough, gets namechecked in that song). Allen posed for photos in Saint Laurent and raved about the Pierre Fray carpets, but on West End Girl she’s fretting how she could “never afford it” on her own.
The song also details how the main character finds out she “got a lead in a play”. Allen received rave reviews for her “spellbinding stage debut” on the West End in a production of 2:22: A Ghost Story. But in her song, the fictional husband’s “demeanour started to change” when he finds out that she got the main part and is moving to London to star in a show. A resurfaced note that Harbour sent Allen, which she shared on her Instagram stories, to celebrate her opening night performance looks more sinister in this light. “My ambitious wife,” it read. “These are bad luck flowers ‘cause if you get reviewed well in this play you will get all kids of awards and I will be miserable, your loving husband.” Allen, of course, received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress.
Even more scathingly, Allen describes the fictional man’s unsupportive response to his partner getting acting plaudits as “quite strange”. Harbour is, of course, most famous for his role as Jim Hopper in Stranger Things, the long-running Netflix show that will conclude in its fifth and final season in November. Allen’s ex will be about to embark on a very awkward press junket. It wouldn’t be the first time a famous man became threatened by his partner’s success.
Allen doubles down with her song Madeline, about someone who finds out their partner has been breaking the rules of an open relationship. “It had to be with strangers / But you're not a stranger, Madeline,” she sings. And on 4chan Stan she asks a fictional lover: “Did you go to Montauk for the weekend?” Montauk being the original name for the series, as well as a village on America’s east coast. All those headlines about a secret affair happening on the set of Stranger Things? Turns out it was a very badly kept secret as far as Allen was concerned. Everyone wants to know who Madeline is, but that’s not the point. Allen has continued in the grand tradition of Dolly Parton’s Jolene by coming up with a pseudonym that scans well. Madeline could well be a chimera, a composite of multiple women and Allen’s own insecurities.
Allen has always set a high bar for truth telling, partially out of necessity. She was just 21 years old when she shot to fame with her 2006 album Smile, sparking an obsession from the press during a period where young pop stars were constantly harangued in the name of selling magazines. The hounding from paparazzies got so out of hand she had to take out a legal injunction in 2009 against two agencies after a photographer’s car hit her vehicle and continued to pursue her.
There was also, as she rightly condemned, an element of sexism to the negative coverage she received. Being outspoken and sometimes a little badly behaved is rock star behaviour if you’re a man — but female pop stars get held to very different standard.
Autofictional song lyrics in West End Girl allow her to wrest back control of the narrative, from the press painting her as simply a scorned woman, and from the story her ex might prefer to paint of himself as a loveable family man. Any headline that comes out today or over the coming weeks will be Allen’s side of the story. She could have done a sit-down interview, or written another tell-all memoir. But the album elevates her pain to the universal; people are already seeing so much of their own hurt in her stories. She’s a celebrity that doesn’t have to strive hard for relatability.
Allen has made a career from being candid to a fault. No one is safe from a send-up — not even her little brother Alfie Allen, a now very successful actor whose former layabout habits got aired in Alfie on Allen’s 2006 Album Alright, Still. Her podcast Miss Me? is a masterclass in cultivating the parasocial and has been a huge hit for BBC Sounds.
Allen is honest, it’s her brand. It’s also her defence mechanism for getting ahead of negative stories. In her memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, she detailed having sex on a plane during an affair with Liam Gallagher and hiring female sex workers to assuage her loneliness during the breakdown of her first marriage. She did this, she said at the time on Miss Me? partly to de-stigmatise her experience, and partly to end the “perpetual fear” she was living in that the tabloids would catch wind of the story. By writing it down, she sucked all the poison right out of journalist’s pens.
After West End Girl, there are no skeletons left in her closet. “I've already let you in, all I can do is sing / So why should I let you win?” Allen asks in Let You W/In. “I will not absorb your shame”. Those dirty sheets she talks about Pussy Palace are no longer her burden to bear in painful silence. Airing dirty laundry sounds tawdry, but Allen understands that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
