Lily Allen's Innit "Lemonade"
The Friday Post.
More from Hung Up this week: Lorde made the song of my summer … a chat about the Love Is Blind S9 reunion … and New Yorkers don’t forget to early vote for Zohran! Today it took me less time than it did to wait in line at my local status bakery …
I’m calling it tea and crumpets “Lemonade.” The British pop star Lily Allen and the Stranger Things actor David Harbour split up after four years of marriage, and Allen tells all on her new album “West End Girl.” The album’s fourteen tracks detail their short-lived bliss, her temporary move to London to do a play, Harbour’s resentment when she got the part without having to audition, and. their decision to navigate the distance by opening their marriage. Eventually, Harbour broke all their rules, and Allen found sex toys and love letters in his bachelor pad apartment.
Allen is candid about her ex-husband’s coldness and her own despair. The marriage story on “Lemonade” is complicated by generations of trauma, history, and strife; “West End Girl” is much more straightforward, a catalog of every right and wrong.
I’m sorry to be so extremely smug here, but you didn’t even need your third open to see how mismatched these two were. My two eyes watched their Architectural Digest home tour years ago — that carpeted bathroom, the leopard print sofa, the way he dismissed all of her little jokes as either primitive or pretentious — and it seemed quite obvious. I’m not saying I knew better! But I am saying that I don’t trust anyone who sleeps in a pastel pink windowless room — if that makes me a Long Island medium (see below), well then next I’ll be telling Kyle Richards that her cheating husband will never emotionally fulfill her.
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In an interview with Mel Ottenberg for Interview, Allen declined to call “West End Girl” a “revenge” album.
