1 day ago
7
Intimacy is inherently messy,” Lily Allen says. We are discussing her break-up album West End Girl, a record that takes the end-of-love template laid out best in Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks or Beyoncé’s Lemonade and throws in the bawdiness and brutal honesty one expects from this one-of-a-kind British pop star.
“There are usually agreed-upon boundaries in relationships,” she explains. “But whether those boundaries are adhered to or not is becoming a grey area all of a sudden. Dating apps make people disposable and that leads to the idea that if you are not happy, there’s so much more to choose from – right in your pocket.”
Allen’s fifth album arrives after a gap of seven years and was made during the demise of her relationship with American actor David Harbour, 50. Theirs was a whirlwind romance. She met the Stranger Things star in 2019 and they married in Las Vegas a year later, with Allen moving to New York with her children, Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 12, from her previous marriage to builder Sam Cooper. West End Girl also marks a return to music after a successful pivot to acting and podcasting.
I ask about some specifics in the album. In the song Tennis, Allen describes spotting a message ping on her husband’s phone from a woman called Madeline. Who is she? “A fictional character.” Is she a construct of others? “Yes.” Another song’s lyrics go: “We had an arrangement/Be discreet and don’t be blatant/It had to be with strangers”, which suggests to me an unconventional marriage that allows flings, so long as they are within certain parameters.
I don’t feel judged in America the way I do here [in the UK]. It is residual trauma from being followed around … when I was 21.
Lily Allen, musician“I just feel we are living in really interesting times in terms of how we define intimacy and monogamy, people being disposable or not,” Allen says. “The way we are being intimate with each other is changing as humans… Lots of young women are not finding the idea of marriage, or even a long-term relationship, that attractive any more.”
But is that such a bad thing? At least there will be far fewer people stuck in loveless relationships. “Oh, I don’t know that it’s necessarily bad,” says Allen, whose own parents, actor Keith Allen and producer Alison Owen, divorced when she was four. “Lots of people from my parents’ generation stayed together for ever and were miserable. You didn’t have endless choice, so you may have worked at something harder. But now you don’t have to.”
We meet on a hot day that brings to mind her early hit LDN – “Sun is in the sky/Oh why oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?” That was 2006, the second song from the vibrant, smart 21-year-old, released after her smash-hit debut single, Smile, reached no.1 in the UK and no.14 in Australia.
Allen is 40 now and dressed in black to match her new album’s mood, with shoulder-length black hair and a vape on the go. Right at the start she pops her phone down to record our interview; she has that defensive side to her, but mostly she is brash, funny – an open book you would find in the thrillers section.
“I thought I didn’t have any good songs left. 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.’ ”Credit: Charlie Denis/BMG/PA Wire
She wrote West End Girl last December, in just 10 days. “I was really depressed,” she admits. “I thought I didn’t have any good songs left. 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.’”
Is there a part of her that would rather just cower? “Well, traditionally in my life, when traumatic things happened, I’ve taken time to step away,” Allen says. “I certainly don’t think I could have got up on stage days after losing a child” – she has suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth – “but that is probably more of an anatomical thing. And there are levels to the humiliation, right?”
Early on in West End Girl she says she wants to “lay my truth on the table”. So, with lyrics about subjects ranging from cheating to vasectomies, is it all true? “I don’t think I could say it’s all true – I have artistic licence,” Allen says, cautiously. “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”
The record starts off happily. “Yes, for about 44 seconds,” Allen says, laughing. It paints the initially optimistic picture of a woman who moves to New York with her two kids to live with her wonderful new husband in a lush brownstone in Brooklyn. She is offered a play in London, but the husband’s not keen. He gaslights her and is unsupportive.
By the time the first song — also called West End Girl — finishes, there are tearful phone calls. Soon the sex stops, and by song four, Tennis, he seems to be having an affair. “Who the f--- is Madeline?” his wife asks. By the seventh song, the Jilly Cooper-esque Pussy Palace, their marriage is detritus as the wife finds a plastic bag, “with the handles tied, sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside” in the husband’s secret apartment. Other songs – Relapse, Nonmonogamummy, Beg for Me – continue the extraordinary, explicit narrative.
Loading
“I hide in music,” she says. “It is the musical version of what I do in my life.” She continues: “I’ll say on a podcast that I’ve forgotten how many abortions I’ve had, to the tune of a Frank Sinatra song — it’s my personality.”
She did this in June on the Miss Me? podcast she hosted with her friend Miquita Oliver. “It’s like, ‘Ha ha ha! This is so tragic, let’s all have a laugh!’ It’s a British thing, but also I’m a well-documented nepo baby – my dad was a comedian and so was my stepdad.” (After her parents split, Allen’s mother was in a relationship with Harry Enfield.) “So I have always been surrounded by people who make light of dark situations for a living.”
Allen has been open about her ongoing recovery from addiction.Credit: Charlie Denis
Allen, who was born in London in 1985, says that moving to New York with Harbour was “a huge commitment”. She quickly learnt to love the city – the theatre, food, weather and “how little time for bullshit people have”. She is still not sure where she, Ethel and Marnie will live, but adds that the help she gets with alcohol and drug dependency is better in the US. She goes to “lots of different types of therapy”, as well as Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “I keep myself in good shape,” she adds, saying that she goes to the gym three times a week and does Pilates twice a week.
Allen’s life has long been a very public tumult of hedonism, baby loss, being stalked by a man who broke into her home, and issues with mental and physical health. It is a wonder that she is still … “Alive?” she interjects. I was going to say “OK”, but the interruption speaks volumes.
She also loves New York because barely anybody there knows who she is – as opposed to Britain, where she’s hardly been out of the news for 20 years. “I don’t feel judged in America the way I do here [in the UK]. It is residual trauma from being followed around by 50 guys with long-lens cameras when I was 21, and then the words that came with the photos the next day.”
Early in her career she filmed herself crying in a hotel room and posted it on MySpace. “People were making comparisons between me and Amy Winehouse,” she says. “How much more successful she was, how much uglier and fatter I was. I was feeling sorry for myself and, look, the reality is nobody gives a shit. But … there’s a lot of misrepresentation that I’m fighting over here.”
Interestingly, she says that she is “quite brutal” about what her children can access online and only very recently – and “really reluctantly” – allowed them phones.
Loading
She was sitting in the New York flat that she bought with Harbour when Olivia Rodrigo’s manager emailed a few years ago, asking Allen if she would appear with the pop star at Glastonbury. Her daughters said:“You have to.”
“It’s been years since I put out an album; they’ve never really seen me on stage,” Allen says. “Marnie thought that I was going to be a backing singer; their minds were blown. People went ballistic. Marnie said, ‘So, were you popular then?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I was quite, back in my day.’ We’d been living in a bubble in Brooklyn.”
That bubble has burst but Allen says she is OK. How? “I’m financially OK,” she says. “I have a roof over my head and food in the fridge and my kids are doing well and those markers are huge.”
At Glastonbury, Allen sang her 2008 song F--- You with Rodrigo, directed at the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade. Who would she aim that song at now? “There’s not really anyone I’m that f---ed off with, personally,” she shrugs. “I can’t think of anyone I let get under my skin these days.”
West End Girl is out now.
The Times (UK)
Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up here for our free newsletter.
