In late October, two days after British singer-songwriter Lily Allen unexpectedly released her confessional fifth album, West End Girl, about the breakdown of her marriage to actor David Harbour, the couple's Brooklyn mansion went on the market for $8 million. The house, located in Carroll Gardens, had, as Saturday Night Live's Stephon would say, the following: All: wall-to-wall white tiger-print carpeting, swan taps, Versailles-style toilet. IN Architectural Digest tour of the site, 2023: a couple shows off the sauna and soaks in the cold in their backyard. Harbor said they wanted their bathroom, with its floral rug, fireplace and armchair, to have a “Parisian vibe where you could feel like you're reading Proust and smoking Gitanes in the bathtub or something.” Dream!
Allen seems to be singing about home on opener “West End Girl,” which begins with sweet, breathy, fairy-tale optimism and ends with the couple renegotiating the terms of their union. “And now we're all here, we moved to New York / We found a nice little apartment next to a nice little school,” Allen sings. “Now I'm looking at houses with four or five stories / And you found us a brownstone, said, 'Do you want it? He's yours.” She makes it clear that he wanted it: “I could never afford it / You pushed it forward / Made me feel a little awkward.” All goes well until Allen, or her narrator (the line is blurred), gets a part in a West End play and leaves for London. Once there, her husband calls and, although the song doesn't explicitly say so, appears to be asking for an open marriage. The narrator reluctantly agrees. “No, I’m fine,” she says, “I want you to be happy.”
What follows is a breakup album for the ages, in which the spectacular, almost operatic breakdown of a marriage is laid out like a hen and cockerels. All the bad stuff is there: texts with her husband's mistress, the discovery of a stash of sex toys, a near relapse and a spiral of anxiety. On perhaps the album's most memorable song, “Pussy Palace,” Allen sings about finding Duane Reade's bag filled with butt plugs and lube in an apartment she believed, albeit inexplicably, to be some sort of dojo. (“Hundreds of Trojans, you're so damn broken / How did I get into your double life?”) Under the pseudonym Dallas Major, there's a poppy, artificially upbeat song about her failed attempts to date after a relationship starts to fall apart. “My name is Dallas Major and I'm going out to play/Looking for someone to have fun with while my husband is gone,” she sings with fragile determination. “I'm almost forty, I'm only five foot two / I'm a mom of teenage kids, do you think that's funny? / Cause I hate it here / I hate it here.”
Fine. What more could you ask for? Are we looking at high art? Probably not. Did I hum “Pussy Palace” when I picked up my baby from daycare? Absolutely. These are unbridled, feel-good songs that speak to a primal, if unflattering, thirst for dirt. (Get down in the ditch! It's fun!) Compared to Taylor Swift's “A Dancer's Life” anemic last albumover which fans have more or less unsuccessfully explored hints about her personal life, Allen offered up a veritable buffet of revealing details. “We had an agreement / Be discreet and not outspoken,” she sings about the terms of her marriage. “There had to be a payment / It had to be with strangers.” Swift gave us a scarf, but Allen aired all her dirty laundry.
How much of this actually happened? It's hard to know for sure. Last month, in an album discussion, Allen told the British Fashion“There are things that I have experienced that are recorded… but that doesn’t mean it’s all gospel.” Allen and Harbor reportedly split around December 2024, and Allen wrote songs during this time, she said, as “a way for me to process what was going on in my life.” There is a track called “Tennis,” in which the narrator reads messages from a certain Madeline on her husband’s phone. “Who the hell is Madeline?” she sings. Then, in the next song, “Madeline”, she raps something that sounds like Madeline's message to her. (Madeline ends with the infuriating words “Love and light, Madeline.”) Is Madeline real? Allen recently told Sunday Times that Madeline was a “fictional character” but admitted that she was a “construct” of real people.
