West End Girl — Lily Allen — a review

Was Lily Allen looking to replace her Comic Strip-era father Keith in her four year marriage to actor David Harbour? If the Freudian confessionals on Allen’s new album West End Girl are anything to go by, we might reasonably conclude so.

But hang on, haven’t Sigmund Freud’s theories, such as the evergreen ‘penis envy’, been decried by the multi-generational feminism which Lily seems to embody? Yes indeed it has, on the papers; but in the mouths of Meghan Markle and Gwyneth Paltrow, Lily’s sister third-wave-posing-as-fourth-wave feminists, Nu-Sex-Psyche still rules the couch.

In fairness West End Girl does an often hilarious job of parodying Valley Woman Cali-speak, in that piss-taking, suburban dropped-t, English street girl way of hers. Like Sabrina Carpenter, Lily can not only knock out a banger, she can be deadly funny with it too (quite a bit funnier than her dear old dad anyway).

Previously I had thought Allen’s early mega-hit Smile to be a strangely characterful Summer tune for a 2000s era defined by pop blandness (plus ca change); and WEG, with that Pet Shop Boysy title, fleshes that track out over a whole album of ‘lived experience’.

Yes reader, Lily is now ‘trauma informed’ — maybe she always was, no data detected. But her tears make for our rather compelling listening. WEG is simply brilliantly written and produced, which is more that you can say for anything made by Markle, Paltrow, or anything Chris Martin as done since 2005. Grit, innit, however many millions are in the bank.

The album goes through something of a story-arc from excitable nuptials, to rumbles of ‘coercive control’, to Lily’s (enforced?) agreement to an ‘open relationship’, to Harbour allegedly violating that agreement. One odd line contains the details of this agreement, which includes ‘always payment’ as a condition of the others’ liaisons. Does this mean that one of the partners’ infidelity was ok as long as it was prostitution — sorry, supporting sex workers’ rights? I can’t keep up. It would be interesting, even necessary, to hear Harbour’s side of things — maybe a one-man stage play? That seems to be how these incestuous arts tie-ins work these days.

Pussy Palace has an ominous title, being rather than Allen’s imagined ‘dojo’ — home as Kung-Fu room, apparently — but is an absolutely beautiful track in the London Grammar mould behind the deeply waspish lyrics, butt-plugs and lube included. Ruminating contains the dreaded bloody autotune, but done as catchily as everything LA seems to, her worries over her decisions being processed through slightly annoying studio wizardry.

The entire record is an exercise in waspishness as it happens, its stylistic ADHD bouncing between genres over ten or so tracks the way David Bowie took ten albums to do in the 70s. Dallas Major is a hilarious, funky little piece, eyeing the past glories of ‘Madeline’ (a costume designer called Natalie Tippett with whom Harbour had an affair) as she steps into the other-woman’s-husband market near her 40s and with teenage kids in tow.

I could have told Lily never to put all your eggs in the bearded basket of an American Aries actor, as the long-term fidelity she seems to crave may not lie in that direction, but the temptation to surpass her silly old dad simply would not listen, I imagine. Still, multi-millions of listens on Spotify in its first week of release, stimulated by a clearly bonza production and ‘marketing team’, is reward in itself.

Lily was clearly in the ‘grief stage’ of breakup in December 2024 when West End Girl was recorded, as she has since basically admitted, and in the week of its release Harbour was seen accompanying Allen’s kids out and about as if the world’s tabloids weren’t talking about his sex addiction and supply of butt-plugs, which is tremendously modern. So our heroine may now have moved onto her ‘acceptance’ phase, presumably back on Hinge while cooking up new dramas in Mayfair, plastering on the fake Cali-smile in engaging in a spot of conscious uncoupling.

Never mind, no one died and an artist is entitled, nay required, to turn their life experiences into art. Despite myself the album sat happily on repeat for a whole day, as I allowed the drama of romantic idealism meeting others’ sex — or intimacy? — addiction to earworm its way in, and it was fun. Because despite that unfortunate selling-pictures-of-her-feet affair, Lily Allen IS great fun. Is that still allowed?

Listen, forever and in perpetuity, here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4Dn3Z14YfT2gQVDgLmWUVn?si=hiWSq4DaTtS4Q85qNGbg7w