The New Yorker:

On “West End Girl,” all the gritty bits are there: messages with a husband’s mistress, the discovery of a cache of sex toys.

By Anna Russell

In late October, two days after the British singer-songwriter Lily Allen unexpectedly released her confessional fifth album, “West End Girl,” about the breakdown of her marriage with the actor David Harbour, the couple’s Brooklyn brownstone went on the market for eight million dollars. Situated in Carroll Gardens, the house had, as Stefon from “Saturday Night Live” would say, everything: wall-to-wall white tiger-print carpeting, swan taps, a commode modelled after those in Versailles. In an Architectural Digest tour of the place, from 2023, the couple show off the sauna and cold plunge in the back yard. Harbour said that they wanted their floral, carpeted bathroom, which contained a fireplace and an armchair, to have “a Parisian kind of feeling, somewhere where you could feel like you’re reading Proust and smoking Gitanes in the bathtub, or something.” The dream!

Allen seems to sing about the house in the first track of “West End Girl,” which begins sweetly, with breathy, fairy-tale-like optimism, and ends with the couple renegotiating the terms of their union. “And now we’re all here, we’ve moved to New York / We’ve found a nice little rental near a sweet little school,” Allen sings. “Now I’m looking at houses with four or five floors / And you’ve found us a brownstone, said ‘You want it? It’s yours.’ ” She makes clear that this is something he wanted: “I could never afford this / You were pushing it forward / Made me feel a bit awkward.” All is well until Allen, or her narrator (the line is blurry), lands a part in a play on the West End and leaves for London. Once there, her husband calls and—though it is not explicitly stated in the song—seems to ask for an open marriage. The narrator reluctantly agrees. “No, I’m fine,” she says, “I want you to be happy.”

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