The British singer’s return to the industry brings real and delicious intrigue. Finally.
The song genre that is “calling out your man after you’ve caught him cheating” is a tricky one. With a canon that already includes classics like “Jolene” and Beyoncé’s “Sorry,” modern follow-ups usually fail to add anything lasting or new to the conversation — considering the implications that surrounds writing such a song. In this ever-churning, gossip fodder-fed world, anything remotely scandalous will inevitably be dissected to the gods. As a protective measure, artists might rather lather it up in metaphors and vague platitudes that ultimately result in something bland and meaningless. But not Lily Allen.
On her new album, West End Girl, one can imagine a singular red laser jetting out of her mouth and directly to the head of whatever target she’s singing about. Seven years following the release of her last album and now 40 years old and having gone through a life up-ending divorce — Allen has stockpiled years of life, lived emotion, and writing wit that’s been waiting on the sidelines for this exact moment. She’s not interested in beating around the bush to tell a generic, boring tale; she’s here to etch a story clearly into stone.
This mission is perhaps the most clear on the one-two hit of songs “Tennis” and “Madeline,” which together break into the “calling out your man after you’ve caught him cheating” canon with aplomb. They make up the best scandal retelling I’ve heard in recent memory, told in such plain, simple detail the story unfolds clearly like watching a Dateline episode. In the wider album — a project of autofiction not autobiography, she’s specified — it functions as the all-revealing climax. And what a spectacle it is.
“Tennis” sets the scene, a song that starts off as a delightful jaunt before going wayward in the second half. Thematically, Allen, the narrator, finds out about her husband’s secret lover, a discovery propelled by this wonderfully specific detail: “it was how you grabbed your phone back right out of my hands.” The song breaks when she finally drops the name: “And who’s Madeline?”
“Madeline,” the subsequent confrontation between the two women, is deliciously set against a galloping, Western backdrop. It’s delicious and juicy, a slow-drip of information that Allen feeds us until it gets to the reveal: that perhaps both these two women have been two-timed by a dirtbag man under the guise of an “open marriage.” Even the mistress Allen paints in such detail to convey the type of woman she is, one who says to a wife, “I hate that you’re in so much pain right now… Lies are not something that I want to get caught up in.”
In a moment when artists more than ever are using music as a tool to spill the tea and generate headlines (re: Taylor, Cardi B) there is paradoxically a dearth of actually scandalous material, songs that shock, make you gasp or blush from secondhand embarrassment. Last night, while blasting West End Girl in the shower, unaware of what was awaiting me, I actually had to turn off the water during this song to play what I thought I’d just heard her say again. How refreshing it is to hear a song that compels a raised eyebrow when so many out there really make you want to snooze.
Allen’s strength in writing these two tracks isn’t even really about the fact that she dropped a name. Madeline itself is a pseudonym (don’t bother Googling who it might be) for obvious legal reasons. It’s really besides the point, considering all the other details are painted in such clear, decisive color by Allen’s hand you end up seeing the rough contours of a face as clearly as a police suspect sketch.
And anyway, after hearing Allen’s songs I am thoroughly satisfied, neither eager to Google about her ex-husband’s side nor interested in stalking and abetting the brief spotlight his new mistress would otherwise get. That, to me, sounds like the true cherry on top of Allen’s revenge.