Hell hath no fury like a Lily Allen scorned. Her new album, West End Girl, is a an instant hit, reminding us that at 40 she’s still the queen of British pop. It’s also a thorough evisceration of her feelings about the breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things star David Harbour. Although, for legal reasons, it’s not the unvarnished truth but autofiction — blending facts from her life with fictional characters. It’s all art, and Allen is a master artist.
Where Taylor Swift likes to drop Easter eggs, Allen is the whole damn Easter bunny, dropping a basket of headlines directly into fans, gossipers and journalist’s lap. There’s not much to decode here, she’s laid out a whole story from start to finish. And because her marriage was so high profile, anyone who keeps up with celebrity news knows exactly when and where everyone was when everything went down. But as she told Vogue, in between she showing off her new boob job to a suitably impressed interviewer, you can’t take her words in the lyrics as “gospel”.
