After seven years away, Lily Allen is finally back with brand new music in the form of a deeply cutting narrative album called West End Girl.
The record leads us through an ‘autofictional’ retelling of her marriage to actor David Harbour, who she divorced in December.
They had been together since 2019 and tied the knot at a fun ceremony in Las Vegas in 2020, however, Lily paints a romance-free image of the relationship.
Since their split, there have been rumours that the Stranger Things actor may have had an affair for three years with an unnamed costume designer.
Lily, 40, appeared to confirm this with her brutal step-by-step documenting of their relationship’s demise, calling this mystery woman ‘Madeline’.
On the track Tennis, she reads his texts and repeatedly asks ‘who is Madeline’ before launching into the next track named after this mystery woman.
Who is Madeline?
In the song, she pleads with Madeline for the ‘truth’ as she ‘can’t trust anything that comes out of his mouth’.
Lily tells the woman, ‘We had an arrangement, Be discreet, and don’t be blatant, There had to be payment, It had to be with strangers’.
The rather pointed use of the word stranger, given David’s best-known role, also suggests this was someone he and potentially Lily knew well.
A source previously revealed David and his mystery woman ‘weren’t very secretive about their relationship’, having ‘met on a movie’.
They also claimed he even flew the woman to the Stranger Things set in Atlanta during filming, which is hardly the ‘discreet’ no-emotions arrangement Lily described.
The woman’s name was never revealed, so it’s unclear if Madeline is fictional or if the Not Fair hitmaker really is putting someone on blast.
Has David Harbour responded?
David, 50, has not spoken out since the split, but did state in an interview that he no longer dates ‘normal’ people as they don’t understand his industry.
He said: ‘I tried to date lawyers and business people in my twenties, but there’s something about being a carny freak that normal people don’t get.’
Lily closes the track with the American drawl of Madeline, telling her: ‘He told me you were aware this was going on, and that he had your full consent’.
While the conversation may be fictional, the accusations of cheating are very real, as David reportedly even had a Raya dating profile.
In December, Lily was spotted on the celebrity dating app, apparently looking for her then-husband after the ‘agony’ of discovering he had one.
Lily Allen’s West End Girl tracklist
- West End Girl
- Ruminating
- Sleepwalking
- Tennis
- Madeline
- Relapse
- Pussy Palace
- 4Chan Stan
- Nonmonogamummy
- Just Enough
- Dallas Major
- Beg For Me
- Let You W/In
- Fruityloop
‘Lily was looking for women that were on Raya and cross-referencing them with women David follows on Instagram to try to figure out who he was seeing. She was doing her Wagatha thing,’ a source told Mail On Sunday in January.
The title was a reference to the infamous Wagatha Christie trial between WAGs Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, in which the former found the latter had been leaking stories about her to the media.
Since the split, Lily checked into a trauma centre as she became suicidal and almost relapsed on her sobriety.
She told Vogue: ‘I wanted to die. I’ve been into those places before against my will and I feel like that’s progress in itself. That’s strength. I knew that the things I was feeling were too extreme to be able to manage, and I was like, “I need some time away.”’
After returning to London earlier this year with her two daughters from her first marriage – Marnie, 12, and Ethel, 11 – Lily said her album explores the emotional fallout of the relationship.
‘There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel,’ she explained. ‘It is inspired by what went on in the relationship.’
Now, she’s in a much better place. ‘Really not in the same space that I was when I wrote [these] songs,’ she said. ‘I have come a long way. I feel OK, actually.’
David has since gone on to date Ellie Fallon, an aspiring model 22 years his junior, while Lily describes her dating life since their split as ‘bitterly disappointing’.
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