Lily Allen ‘West End Girl’ Review: An Impractical Guide to Spilling Tea

Early on in Lily Allen’s West End Girl, a concept album that recounts the end of the English singer’s open marriage to actor David Harbour, I was reminded of Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s book The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love. One of the authors’ zeal for polyamory seems to be a trauma response from repeated abuse by men, making the book’s arguments for open relationships less persuasive. (A more level-headed case for non-monogamy is made in Christopher Ryan and Caclilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality.)

Allen, who describes her relationship with her ex-husband as a “marriage of convenience,” doesn’t seem to be repelled by non-monogamy per se but, like the Ethical Slut author, by a betrayal of trust. On “Fruitloopy,” she economically sums up Harbour’s entire psychological profile—mommy complex, abandonment issues, the pressures of fame—in just one verse, and she confronts his alleged manipulation and gaslighting on “Sleepwalking”: “I don’t know if you do it intentionally/Somehow you make it my fault.”

“Relapse” sees Allen acknowledging her part in a mutually toxic relationship, though she appears to hold Harbour solely responsible for whatever self-destructive actions she may take as a result. And she begins to grapple with the notion that it might be impossible to satisfy a partner’s every desire on “Sleepwalking” but stops just short of fully grasping the concept.

Allen has called West End Girl a work of “autofiction,” which means that she’s a somewhat unreliable narrator—or at least one who’s taken creative license with some of the details of her relationship. Whether that’s fair to Harbour is a question best left to him and the countless others who’ve foolishly gotten romantically involved with a famous writer. But the back-to-back “Pussy Palace,” in which Allen reveals she discovered butt plugs in Harbour’s “dojo,” and “4chan Stan” are particularly vindictive.

Moreover, Allen’s hyper-specificity, including attributing direct quotes to Harbour, has a practical impact on the songs themselves. The second half of the opening title track—a deceptively breezy, string-laden ditty featuring a repetitive hook that feels like a placeholder that Allen forgot to rewrite—consists entirely of a one-sided phone call in which the singer is ostensibly pitched the idea of an open relationship. More spoken interludes, in which Allen comes troublingly close to blaming another woman for her husband’s indiscretions, punctuate “Madeline,” which condescendingly paints the eponymous character as an American airhead.

West End Girl is strongest when Allen conveys her narrative via actual song—as she does on the exhilarating “Ruminating” and the wistful “Let You W/In,” with its heartbreaking, descending melody—and not just as vehicle to air dirty laundry or settle scores. She delves into her own insecurities on “Beg for Me” (“I wanna be held, I wanna be told I’m special and I’m unusual”) and packs an entire album’s worth of hurt into a single line on the tight but gawkily titled “Nonmonogamummy” (“I changed my immigration status for you to treat me like a stranger”).

Allen drops her armor long enough to get really vulnerable on the lovely acoustic ballad “Just Enough”: “Look at my reflection, I feel so drawn, so old/I booked myself a facelift, wondering how long it might hold.” It’s too bad, then, that she defaults to doling out more juicy soundbites by song’s end: “Why are we here talking about vasectomies?/Did you get someone pregnant?” As a vehicle to get the tea (or at least half of the tea), West End Girl is titillating, but as a piece of music it ultimately feels less than revelatory.