SEND IN THE CLOWNS

There’s a kind of ghoulish fascination in taking a quick tour through Lily Allen’s latest album, West End Girl, which deals with her problematic marriage to the American actor David Harbour. Following in the tradition of divorce and heartbreak albums such as Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, Allen seems to be drawing on her signature diary-style songwriting approach to close a painful chapter in her life.

Now, I’m not claiming that this album deserves to sit alongside the truly great breakup records mentioned above, but it does demonstrate that there’s value in metaphorically opening your veins in public and bleeding out pop songs that remind listeners that even celebrities can feel pain like the rest of us. Perhaps because most of us are no longer as interested in the lives of celebrities, brutal honesty has become their most effective currency for staying relevant. Those “brave” enough to peel back the artifice, the veils, and the filters to reveal the real flesh and blood behind the illusion of their seemingly perfect lives are applauded for their honesty, even if that honesty is itself partly illusory.

Funnily enough, it doesn’t seem that long ago that I stumbled upon an Architectural Digest video where Allen and Harbour showed off their newly decorated Brooklyn brownstone in New York City. Even watching that brief footage, I could tell there was something not quite right about the two of them and their whole vibe as a couple. They looked like two strangers trying to pretend they were really in love, but there was a loneliness in both their eyes that betrayed whatever they were trying to sell to the camera — especially Harbour, who seemed distinctly in a world of his own.

Singling out (pun intended) a track from the album that captures the wistful melancholy of this scorned woman, my favourite is probably 4 Chan Stan, which has a cascading sense of a marriage falling apart, while Allen’s recriminations of Harbour are wrapped in an infectiously poppy earworm that creates a surreal yet strangely comforting schism for the listener, as if we’re sitting in the space of the broken-hearted artist herself.