Even in our garish online age, most celebrities and pop stars sensibly obfuscate the details of their private lives.
Not so much Lily Allen. She seems to work through her issues by laying it all out there. No tabloid can pull a scoop if you’ve Tweeted everything already (as she did when announcing she’d hired female prostitutes on her Sheezus tour to spike Daily Mail revelations). Her 2018 memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, was eye-wateringly candid. It’s not just the juice she shares, but the way it makes her feel, why she reckons she behaves as she does. Our attention is drawn, but engaging can feel prurient, intrusive.
Never more so than on West End Girl, her return to music after seven years away, recorded over a couple of weeks, a concept piece entirely focused on her collapsed marriage to US actor David Harbour. He does not come out of it well. It’s an album that goes well beyond modern relationship breakdown staples such as Taylor Swift’s Red, Beyoncé’s Lemonade or Lorde’s Melodrama.
Lyrically, it’s all there, an articulate, pithy 14-song spew of rage, pain and betrayal; how they grew into an open relationship (or was she gaslit into it?), but, since their marriage, how he had no interest in her, sexually or otherwise, and only gave himself emotionally to his flings. Alongside this narrative, Allen berates herself (“I just want to meet your needs and, for some reason, I am back to people-pleasing”), and, on the likeably lounge-funky “Dallas Major”, forlornly throws herself back into online dating (“I used to be quite famous, that was way back in the day, yes, I’m here for validation”).
Alongside this brutal autofictive poetry, the tunes and music pootle along, smoothly downtempo electro-pop of mixed memorability, but occasionally rising to remind of Allen’s musical pomp, as on songs such as the sweetly bleak, tuneful “4Chan Stan”, the flamenco-touched “Madeline”, the digital reggae bounce of “Nonmonogamummy”, featuring London MC Specialist Moss, and, especially, the delicate heartbreak of “Just Enough”.
West End Girl feels like something Lily Allen needed to do, an urgent project to heal her psyche. One cannot help but find fascinating such a unique window into the relationship carnage of two such rich and famous people, especially from a wordsmith so eminently capable. Whether it’s similarly musically consistent is another matter.
The final song, “Fruityloop”, makes lyrical reference to Allen's masterpiece, 2009’s It’s Not Me, It’s You. She’s older than the wild cat who made that album, more battered by life, wounds raw and upfront. When the dust settles, though, and the world’s forgotten Allen’s divorce, let alone its minutiae, there will be songs on West End Girl worth returning to.
Below: listen to "Madeline" by Lily Allen
