The Wild Wild West End Girl
- Dec 25, 2025
- 5 min read
Lily Allen and the danger of misbehaving
“I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all.”
So says Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that proposes the origin story for Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s madwoman wife in the attic in Jane Eyre, and, in doing so, opens up a voice against a status quo that seeks to disvalue unpalatable women. Antoinette, the sensuous and emotional daughter of a Jamaican plantation owner, is an example of classic literature’s wild women, untamed and unconventional female characters, characterised by a liberation from the strict obedience demanded by a patriarchal world.
These same words however might have been lifted directly from the lyrics of Lily Allen’s latest album, West End Girl, an antagonistic reflection on the disintegration of her second marriage. With simmering rage and raw sadness, she takes fire at her ex, using the dichotoma of marriage and celebrity, across rippling synths and catchy, circular hooks.
Growing up as a British teenager, I remember the fever when Lily Allen burst onto the scene. She was cocky, pouting, gamine. Mouthy, rude, chic. We loved her winged eyeliner and 1960s beehives. She sang with an anti-Establishment North London accent that evoked punky Cool Britannia. From the get-go, she was wild. The UK press loved to position her as a bit dirty, a naughty miscreant in pastel ankle socks. Controversy - some appropriate - has followed her ever since: a drug dealer past, accusations of racism, topless tabloid photos.
Now, as Allen approaches forty, West End Girl is a more mature but nightmarish song cycle, chronicling her move to New York, returning to London for a play, discovering her husband’s affair. American husband aside, the restrained emotional unavailability of the album feels authentically British. “No daughter of mine should ever be in a position to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept”, wrote the infamous feminist Angela Carter, referencing not only her macabre romantic defiance but a characteristically British stoicism and emotional breastplate towards adversity. The public stiff-upper lip is reflected youthfully in Allen’s cooly diffident nonchalance. “You know, I used to be quite famous, that was way back in the day” she offers in the casually mid-tempo “Dallas Major”, a sweeping understatement for an artist with two triple platinum albums and a Grammy nomination. Her coquettish edge remains; “Sleepwalking” is a tongue-in-cheek lullaby in swinging waltz time on her husband’s sex life.
She isn’t just British: Lily Allen is a London woman, cut from the same tweed as Virginia Woolf, and she interweaves the city into her public identity. Literally a West End Girl, Lily evokes Woolf’s complicated women, whose deft natures have smart Soho and Bloomsbury neighbourhoods written into them. However, while Orlando or Mrs Dalloway are irreverent and whimsical, Allen seems cannily self-aware throughout her poised attack on her husband.
Indeed, the dynamic between curated privacy and performatively public emotion is at play throughout the album. For this justified cry of empowerment is still curated; its release was juicily timed ahead of the Stranger Things press circuit. The same day, their infamous Brooklyn townhouse hit the real-estate market; we can now recognise the real-life Pussy Palace bedsheets in the music video. Do we love it? Yes. Do we think it’s sensationalised? Yes. Is her pain real? Also yes.
Like Antoinette, Allen describes an unravelling as she loses her identity, socially beneath the influence of a dominant man whom she loves. “The ground is gone beneath me…I moved across an ocean” (“Relapse”). Disconnection is a prominent theme, both from her husband (“I changed my immigration status for you to treat me like a stranger”, “Nonmonogamummy”) and from her “invisible” self (“Let You W/in”). The album reflects that alienation: it’s at once non-specific with Allen’s internal thoughts and daggerlike in its indictments to her husband. Does “sex addict” really rhyme with “Pussy Palace”? Lily Allen doesn’t care. Her swagger overrides such details on a wave of emotion.
This is justified: if her last album insisted she felt No Shame, self-consciousness appears to have crept into her second marriage. “He loves you, I’ve gotten old, gotten ugly” (Madeline). Allen admits pressure to relinquish her public wildness to become a pleasing “modern wife” (“Relapse”). I can’t help but see symmetry with Sylvia Plath’s raw confessional poetry (“The constriction killing me also” she wrote in The Rabbit Catcher after discovering husband Ted Hughes’ affair). Flexible, even unkempt, free verse scatters in and out of pre-choruses, with heavy reverb exaggerating the loose line endings. The soundscape tapestry is intricate and disorientated - sampling from early 00s dancehall Lumidee or, deliciously, the electronic Strangers Things arpeggios - producing something disorientated and unrooted. Haunting repetition is a prominent feature - “ruminating ruminating ruminating ruminating” - forcing a hypnotic, spiralling anxiety.
Like any woman in the public eye, there is a price to be paid for blurring fact and autofiction. And the response to West End Girl includes those who see the album as self-serving and bitter ragebait - or a hypocritical stance by Allen, who cheated on her first husband with prostitutes while on tour and had an affair with Noel Gallager. But this feeds into the trope of Madonna/Whore; once a woman falls, she deserves to be disrespected. Allen is rebuilding a reputation: “I can walk out with my dignity, if I lay my truth on the table” (“Let You W/in”).
Sadly - or ecstatically, depending on your view - the impact of the album is never going to be based on the music. It will be valued at the level of sordid accusation directly aimed against a household name. Despite that, my favourite track on the album is “Just Enough”: its schmaltzy strings reminiscent of Old Hollywood at its most romantic.
Regardless, West End Girl has found its audience. Those teenage girls who copied Lily’s eyeliner have grown up and instantly sold out her recently announced tour. We have had our own interactions with patriarchal bullshit, and our frustrations are vindicated by a prominent woman who has taken the silver bullet to her respectability in order to call it out. Across my group chats, the crueler the memes towards Harbour are, the better. Antoinette Cosway may have reclaimed her autonomy by burning Northfield Hall to the ground and jumping from the barricade but Lily Allen has lit a different fire and, alongside the imperfections, I love to see it burn.
Cara is a writer and actor from Edinburgh, living in London. She writes about classic literature and modern culture, and worked as a theatre critic for two years. As an actor, she’s worked with Tom Stoppard, Patrick Marber and David Hare, and has developed new writing at The Bush and the Royal National Theatre. @caraballingall
Thank you so much - I swear I still have “Pussy Palace” stuck in my head