Lily Allen - West End Girl

When Lily Allen first announced details of her fifth album ‘West End Girl’ by giving just four days’ notice before its release, there was perhaps the sense that this record would be a bit revealing. What couldn’t have been prepared for in that space of time, though, is just how plainly and vulnerably this album would lay out the most gut-wrenching tale of heartbreak and betrayal. 

For those who’ve been tuned into the Londoner’s non-musical movements of late, it will not come as a surprise to learn that Lily has been going through it recently. Whether via appearances on her Miss Me? podcast with childhood friend Miquita Oliver (which she has now left to focus on her current endeavours), or the countless tabloid headlines that followed their open conversations around her worsening mental health and a stint in a treatment centre, it’s been clear that the breakdown of her marriage has taken quite the toll. And on ‘West End Girl’, she provides us with a play-by-play reenactment, inspired, as she said in a recent interview with Vogue, “by what went on in the relationship”, with all the gory details left in.

Granted, it has to be assumed that there is some artistic license at play here - or, at least, that’s what we imagine any lawyers involved would want to relay - but the album’s retelling of this relationship and its eventual demise is so utterly visceral, so disarmingly shocking that it’s impossible not to wonder where the line between truth and fiction really lies. Across its fourteen tracks, Allen is a master narrator - like a Pollyanna Emcee - navigating each twist and turn of her tale in a way that feels unapologetically theatrical but utterly pitch perfect. 

From the swooning, Brooklyn-based scene-setter that is its opening track (“I thought that that was quite strange,” she coos, at those first glimpses of gaslighting), to the Western-flecked, pistols-at-dawn energy of ‘Madeline’ (in which our narrator recounts messages exchanged between her and her husband’s mistress), each track’s musicality seamlessly shapeshifts to reflect the growing sadness and unease of her story. It’s the glacial, spacey beats of ‘Pussy Palace’ - and the wide-eyed, almost innocent harmonies of its chorus - that feel to cut deepest though; a song littered with grubby detritus and uncomfortable detail, given an ethereal, ear wormy transformation. 

To try and encapsulate the punishing pain of being subject to adultery and coercive control is, in itself, a staggering feat - let alone, to try and process it over the course of just ten days, the time that it took Lily to write the record. But to do so in a way that also feels so deft and perfectly plotted - all while imbuing the songs with the kind of wit and dry humour that have always been so resolutely her - is really quite extraordinary. Breathtaking and heartbreaking in so many different ways, ‘West End Girl’ may have begun by telling the tale of one of her life’s most bitter chapters, but now it’s become one of her most triumphant.