English Singer and songwriter, Lily Allen has taken the music industry by storm. She is currently the muse of critics and writers alike. While some outlets are dissecting her state-of-the-art Album ‘West End Girl,’ others are cooking up in enthralling forums like, ‘Why do men cheat? Lily Allen and David Harbour edition’ discussing the couples’ troubled love life and marital quandary.
This whole fiasco came into being when Allen released her latest album,‘West End Girl’ hinting at her apprehensive marriage with Stranger Things’ actor David Harbour.
‘West End Girl’ is “inspired by what went on in the relationship” with her cheating husband, David Harbour, Allen acknowledged to Vogue on Monday, October 20. She continued, “That’s not to say that it’s all gospel.” She presents a Sylvia Plath-ian yearning in her lyrics, specifically the song named ‘West End Girl’ (as well), she combined autobiographical elements to pithy and chronicling, just like Plath. The song begins when the singer’s persona falls in love, moves to New York with her two girls, and settles into “a nice little rental near a sweet little school” at the start of the story.
However, the first indications of problems start when she is cast in a West End play (Allen’s stage debut in 2:22 A Ghost Story in 2021 earned her a Laurence Olivier nomination).
She sings, “That’s when your demeanour started to change,” as clouds roll in over the upbeat orchestral background. “You said that I’d have to audition, I said ‘You’re deranged'” .
The relationship begins to dismantle as the album goes on.Allen, the persona she is portraying, grudgingly agrees to the terms of an open marriage when her husband vanishes for weeks at a time.”He had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant / There had to be payment, it had to be with strangers.”
When she discovers texts, everything blows up, and she asks, “Is it just sex or is there emotion?” When Allen, or her character, goes to an apartment where she thought her husband was practicing karate, she finds a room filled with sex toys and ‘a shoebox full of handwritten notes from distraught women’—one of the most grisly instances on the album. She gets perplexed and hurt by his lack of concern when she ultimately breaks up with him, repeatedly asking, “why won’t you beg for me?“
She only acknowledges the necessity of moving on and destroying her relationships in the two last tracks. In her interview with The Vogue, she redefines her views on relationship, “I just feel we are living in really interesting times — in terms of how we define intimacy and monogamy, people being disposable or not, the way we are being intimate with each other is changing as humans. Lots of young women are not finding the idea of marriage or even a long-term relationship that attractive any more.”
Allen added furthermore, “I don’t know [that] it’s necessarily bad. Lots of people from my parents’ generation stayed together forever and were miserable. You didn’t have endless choice so you may have worked at something harder. But now you don’t have to.”
