When you first go, one of the weirdest things about AA meetings is how honest everyone is. Standing up to speak your truth, there’s no florid language to disguise the raw, bald facts of things. Spending some time in this no-bullshit bubble of authenticity makes the normal world – a world of forced politeness, fake manners and mechanical codes of conduct – seem unbearably plastic and unreal. Sober for six years, Lily Allen’s new album, West End Girl, lays bare the toxic demise of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. Or at least, for one assumes reasons of legality (“It’s a story,” said the accompanying press release) someone like Harbour. “Farbour” (Fake David Harbour) is a master manipulator, a narcissist and breadcrumber who sold Allen the perfect life before it twisted into a hideously deformed version of that reality.
In the last decade we’ve had some divine divorce albums. “Becky With The Good Hair” was the jezebel Jolene of Beyonce’s classic Lemonade. While the excellent Gaslighter from The Chicks featured the song ‘Tights On My Boat’ detailing how Natalie Maines’ ex entertained his mistress on her actual boat The Nautalee. But unlike Lemonade, there is no pretty narrative happy ending bow on West End Girls and unlike Gaslighter we don’t zoom out of the betrayal into the divorce court.
The swiftness of its creation (written in ten days) and the almost legalistic retelling of Allen’s life feels unprocessed. Add to that the feeling that it’s been first-thought-best-thought-d into existence and just released. For the listener, its rawness can feel akin to ambulance chasing or scrolling the sidebar of shame. But in the fishbowl of fame that Allen has existed in since ‘Smile’ came out in 2006, it’s also a massive eff you to the prurient media class. Allen phone hacks herself. She puts dynamite to the wink-wink era of TikTok lore, subtweets, Deux Mois and Taylor Swift’s Easter Eggs and blows it to smithereens.
Because of the rock canon’s perceived ideas of how A Songwriter should operate, Allen’s golden pen always got obscured by her latest telly show/fashion line/sex toy. But here it is in all its hypnotic, looking-at-a-car-crash glory: vomiting up beautiful couplets of utter emotional desolation and romantic hopelessness.
West End Girl the album goes chronologically, blow by blow, into the bloody details, like a war reporter or a pathologist performing an autopsy. The album begins with the title track where we meet the happy newlyweds as they move into their New York brownstone. Almost immediately things begin to unravel. You will have already read about the open marriage and lyrical butt-plug reveal on ‘Pussy Palace’. But her lens flexes meticulously on the clocking of the tiny little details: the guilty way Farbour snatches back his phone on ‘Tennis’ or the passive aggressive mood swing from domestic bliss to professional jealousy on the title track, as well as the recreation of Facetime calls (on ‘West End Girls’) and emails from Farbour’s mistress, “love and light” (‘Madeline’).
It’s both the musical equivalent of someone opening up their bin bag to let you pry inside and the work of a dramatist painting a picture of curdled domestic normalcy. Lines like “I look so drawn, so old / I booked myself a facelift wondering how long it will hold” (‘Just Enough’) and “I used to be quite famous / that was way back in the day” (‘Dallas Major’) drip with a mix of dour resignation and a wisp of humour. In the end the final track, ‘Fruitloops’, articulates the kind of closure that comes after exhaustion and the seismic mourning of what was. “It is what it is / You’re a mess, I’m a bitch” she sings wearily. It reminds you less of any pop contemporaries and more like her beloved Difford and Tilbrook from Squeeze or Kirsty MacColl’s Titanic Days.
Can the truth set you free? Maybe. “I can walk out with my dignity if I lay my truth on the table” Allen sings on ‘Let You W/In’. The honesty of AA suggests that’s the way the light lies. And sometimes that’s all we have.
