George Herbert’s received wisdom is that the best revenge is a life well lived. I guess no one in the 17th century was out there leading a theatre full of people in a mass sing-along about their terrible ex-husband like Lily Allen was at the London Palladium this weekend. The live show to accompany her hit 2025 album West End Girl, which was more like a one-woman musical than a gig, saw her sprawled across chaise longues in various states of undress, pulling vapes out of fridges and generously sharing her pain with a crowd that was very much there to party through it.
When West End Girl came out in October last year, it became a dignified artefact of an undignified break-up. It had been written in an emotional flurry in the 10 days following the end of her marriage to actor David Harbour, and the discussion it prompted was biblical: about nonmonogamous relationships and sex, about celebrity, about dating, about trust, about middle age and divorce. Was it all true? Was it all made up? There were receipts (literally) and YouTube house tours to pore over, carrier bags of butt plugs and lube, devastating phone calls and the mysterious other woman, “Madeline” – it was like a true crime podcast in album form.
If the fervour felt a little grubby, the album stayed clean: it was simply a collection of songs that were deeply sad and almost resigned as they revealed the cracks and chasms of Allen’s marriage (“some of it is based on truth and some of it is fantasy,” Allen told Interview magazine). The feelings are undoubtedly real and extremely brutal as the album’s protagonist goes through the slow realisation that she had not been living the life she thought she had been.
At the show, the raw feeling of the music was echoed by the bleak anonymity of the sets, a series of sparse rooms encased in a box-like structure, as if they’re being put in storage. But the atmosphere in the room was feral. There were girls dressed up as nuns, polka dot everything and rowdy sing-alongs – it felt kind of like laughing at a funeral. The crowd was raving to pure emotional devastation: there was a real sense that everyone there had really been going through it.
Allen didn’t break character until she took her bow. She emerged dressed like Marge Simpson in a Chanel suit for the opening song, which sets a scene of domestic bliss before taking the phone call that sets the show careening off down a different course, in which we hear Allen’s responses to her husband asking to sleep with other people while she’s away. The famous line – “Well, it doesn’t make me feel great” – had the crowd jeering like parliamentary backbenchers.
At Allen’s show, the raw feeling of the music was echoed by the bleak anonymity of the sets (Photo: Henry Redcliffe)For the lilting ballad “Sleepwalking” she retired to the chaise like Annie’s Miss Hannigan; during “Relapse” she rooted around for a Valium in a handbag; in “4Chan Stan” she wrapped herself in a scarf emblazoned with those receipts – which showed the gifts the protagonist’s husband had bought other women – and, of course, the famous Duane Reade bag got its moment. To memeify the absolute low point of your life is a kind of power in itself, robbing it of its sting by revealing the absurdity of it all: see also the rapturous reception to the line “And who the f*** is Madeline?”
I wasn’t sure I would like the show – I worried that the quiet potency of the album might be lost in a performance that could never be anything but contrived. But I underestimated the album’s power. I have spent a long time longing for vengeance on various terrible men in my life. Allen says she’s not interested in revenge, and that’s big of her – but she’s got it anyway, in a Palladium’s worth of girls reflecting her lowest moments back at her, now stripped of their power to hurt.
Lily Allen will tour the UK again in June
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