“I don’t make it easy for myself, do I?” acknowledged Lily Allen, when asked in a recent interview why she keeps putting the intimate details of her personal life in the public domain despite her sensitivity to criticism.
But the 40-year-old pop star’s gift as a songwriter lies in her blunt, witty – and distinctively British – confessional style of storytelling. And West End Girl – her first album in seven years, written in just 10 days earlier this year – is a jaw-dropping tale of a messy open marriage and its inevitable breakdown.
From the “awkward” mortgage negotiations and voicemails from another woman to the bag of sex toys found in the couple’s pied-à-terre, the dirty linen is all pegged out along the line of shifting urban beats. Listening to it makes you feel a little like being on public transport, aural rubbernecking as somebody pours out all the gory details of their divorce in a phone call behind you. Only with some great sonic backdrops which take in elements of jungle, lounge, soul, doo-wop, folk, dancehall, pop and western twang.
Released a year after the end of Allen’s five-year marriage to Stranger Things star David Harbour (50), she told Perfect Magazine that we can take the lyrics as “auto-fiction” – which I suspect means we’re going to assume that it’s almost all true, but names have been changed to appease lawyers.
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