An ostentatious presidential suite in Manchester. A dramatic album the world is still talking about. Front row at Valentino and performing at Chanel in Paris, her name back in the headlines, an arena tour selling out around her.
By every measure, Lily Allen has made it. And yet, she’s not completely convinced.
“Everyone f...... likes my stuff,” she tells STM from said pretentious suite against an array of gaudy metallic vases in a casual fitted tee, unlined face and vape at the ready. “Which means that whatever I do next, they’re going to hate. I’m more scared of the hate and the negative pushback than I am able to enjoy the positive.
“Which either says something about me or something about the world we live in.”
When West End Girl dropped without fuss on October 24 people did more than like it. Since then it’s exceeded more than 275 million streams, out-streaming Taylor Swift and Olivia Dean in the UK at its peak.
The sound. The lyrics. The chaos, gossip, emotion, the audacity of that man. And, of course, who was Madeline?
The 14-track album tickled the voyeuristic part of human nature that craves the mess of a break-up, something those in the public eye so rarely offer up.
Allen served it on a silver platter with her trademark frankness and unfiltered dark humour and listeners ate it up. Now, though, she’s worried there might not be anything left of her to feast on.
The album traces the demise of a marriage (by all accounts, her second to Stranger Things actor David Harbour) sparing no juicy detail; from the intricacies of an open relationship to infidelity, singledom at 40 and struggling with the temptation to give into old coping mechanisms after seven years sober. The two had met on dating app Raya before getting married in Las Vegas in 2020.
Whether the sorry state of affairs happened play-by-play is debatable. Allen says they’re her experiences, but not gospel; Harbour revealed recently they weren’t his.
For seven years Allen had been writing unreleased music, never feeling like anything was worth sharing.
Her fame was subtler compared to her loud burst onto the British music scene with earworm Smile in 2006. There was her podcast Miss Me with childhood friend Miquita Oliver, a stint in theatre and a fling on OnlyFans selling pictures of her feet.
Then, the most acclaimed record of her career — so far — was written in just days.
“It wouldn’t have been as good if I waited and relied on recall, mainly because I have such a bad memory,” she says of creating West End Girl. “I was experiencing things in my life that I felt a need and desire to turn into music, and that record came out.
“I wrote West End Girl in a matter of days, and it felt like me and it felt like something that I wanted to share with the world.”
Allen says passion and trauma have always driven her to put pen to paper, but once upon a 2000s she could weave through the mundane, too. Her 2006 hit LDN is a carefree ride through London, spotting people having lunch in the park and an old lady struggling with her bags, while Alfie is about her brother who needs a job and won’t get out of bed.
Yet that range has narrowed with age. Allen, 41 and a mother of two — Ethel and Marnie, from her first marriage to Sam Cooper — finds the everyday a harder sell in her 40s.
“I think that there’s something about our society that is happy to hear about the mundanities of life if you’re 20, they don’t really want to hear about the mundanities of life when you’re 40,” she muses. “Maybe the extremities seem more interesting as you get older, and the mundanities are more interesting when you’re young.”
This sentiment has helped shape the West End Girl tour, currently playing across the UK and Ireland before it heads to New Zealand then Australia. It’s not your typical pop concert; there is no band to lean on or back-and-forth with the crowd to keep them engaged.
It’s intimate and stripped back, just Allen and her gut-punch of a heartbreak album (she performs only tracks from West End Girl).
On stage she’s a solitary figure, albeit with a few props, including the now infamous Duane Reade bag from Pussy Palace, and stretch of fabric that unwraps into a sheet of cheating “receipts”.
The production was created in collaboration with close friend Anna Fleischle, with outfits styled by Mel Ottenberg, and allows Allen to exist in her own world. She says the audience all but disappears, other than the sea of phone lights that lifts for certain songs. Which hits the crowd reaches for changes from city to city, but one thing is for sure — more than a few have a Madeline in their past.
Its title track chronicles the offer for the lead role in a London West End play — by all reports, 2:22 A Ghost Story — before ending with a re-enacted phone call where the husband convinces a reluctant narrator to agree to an open marriage.
On the record, this theatre role reads like the beginning of the end of their relationship. It also brought Allen a Laurence Olivier award nomination for best actress in a play and an acting instinct that has given her a new edge when performing.
“It gave me a different experience of being on stage, having a fourth wall there and being able to be sort of protected by character,” Allen says.
“It’s interesting presenting something in the way that I’m presenting it, that allows me to both hide behind a fourth wall, but also to be even more vulnerable.”
For all the care that was taken in bringing the album to life on stage, the initial reviews, Allen says, were tepid. “More like a theatre show than a pop show,” she remembers reading.
It wasn’t what the showgoers were gushing.
“I check my Instagram DMs and stuff straight after the show, when I get back to my hotel room, and I have a look on Twitter and see what people are saying and I really don’t see that much negative stuff,” Allen says.
“Yes, it’s unlike normal pop shows that are put on at similar sort of venues but I don’t think people are disappointed in it. It’s something new and it’s something different, and it’s captivating . . . I just want to deliver something that’s truthful to me, right?”
And what feels truthful on stage has evolved as much as she has across her 20-year career. Gone is the trainers-and-tulle-wearing Energizer bunny of the past to give way to someone who would rather you listen and resonate than jump.
“(Over) 15-20 years ago, when I was still drinking and engaging in that kind of stuff, the show felt more of an extension of who I was at that time, and I don’t do that any more,” she says. “I still want to enjoy myself, I want to give people the performance that feels right for me and feels right for them.
“I don’t have to, like, jump up and down and, like, whip everyone into a frenzy, because that’s not where I am in my life any more, it wouldn’t feel truthful. It wouldn’t feel real for me to try and create a kind of environment that I wouldn’t want to be in myself.”
Come November, Allen will bring the show to Perth. It will be seven years since she performed in the State, an upgrade from Metro City in 2019 to RAC Arena.
“I’ve always felt really well supported by the Australian people, and well received,” she says. “Some places feel like it’s a struggle . . . but I don’t feel like that when I’m in Australia. I feel like I’m with my people.”
It’s been eight months on from the release that put her back in the spotlight and the dust shows no sign of settling. The reviews, life lived out of showy hotel rooms, the fear of what comes next — how is Allen really feeling?
“It’s a bittersweet thing,” she says of existing between excitement and fear. “I’m just sort of trying to sit in this moment and take it all in. It’s quite overwhelming . . . but it’s really amazing.”