Who’s Madeline? Is ‘call-out’ lyricism going too far?

More than seven years after her last release, Lily Allen has surprise-dropped a new album, West End Girl. It functions as a shockingly vivid exposé and Allen writes with meticulous detail, recounting specific discoveries of her husband’s extramarital affairs.

But is this kind songwriting really called for?

With West End Girl, Lily Allen has kept receipts and published them for the world to see

Allen’s titular opening track serves as a prologue to heartbreak. She’s in London, all alone, rehearsing for a play – a West End Girl. The ending of the song then provides one half of a crucial telephone conversation. It seems intentionally vague, but, by comparison with later track ‘Dallas Major’ – “my marriage has been open since my husband went astray” – it can be interpreted as the moment Allen learned of her husband’s desire to open their marriage.

In ‘Tennis’, Allen reads her husband’s texts and discovers he’s meeting with someone called Madeline. This massively breaches the terms of an “arrangement” which Allen painstakingly lays out in the following song – “There had to be payment / It had to be with strangers / But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.”

Allen goes further in her viciously cathartic exposition, mocking her husband’s new tennis-partner with a patronising American accent as she weaves into the song what can be interpreted as Madeline’s texts – “He told me you were aware this was going on, and that he had your full consent.”

With West End Girl, Lily Allen has kept receipts and published them for the world to see: “Never been Bergdorf’s / You took someone shopping there on May 24 / You bought her a handbag / It wasn’t cheap”. Naturally, this has led to discourse in the media regarding just how detailed artists should be with their writing, particularly when the people they reference are known to the public.

But is it really fair to – quite literally – air out his dirty laundry?

It is public knowledge that Allen was in a relationship with Stranger Things star David Harbour during the period in which West End Girl would have been written, and she doesn’t shy away from making it clear that some of these songs are about him. In ‘Pussy Palace’, Allen expresses her shock at discovering that the New York apartment she thought was a “dojo” was in fact a place for her husband to take other women – “am I looking at a sex addict?”. Harbour has spoken in interviews about his martial arts training, so the connection to the “dojo” is easily made. But is it really fair to – quite literally – air out his dirty laundry?

Allen seems to think so. Talking to Interview Magazine, she reveals the album was written in 10 days at the height of the breakup rather than retrospectively, a move not typically taken by songwriters. Because of this approach, Allen defends her work as a coping mechanism, telling Interview, “It’s not a cruel album. I don’t feel like I’m being mean. It was just the feelings I was processing at the time.”

Interestingly, Harbour told GQ in April that to reveal anything about his split with Allen would do nothing but provoke “a salacious s***-show of humiliation”, and perhaps she’s proven him right.

When asked for her thoughts on the feelings of the man – assumedly Harbour – who she’s torn to shreds on West End Girl, Allen tells Interview: “I try not to think about that.” So maybe this kind of tea-spilling is fine, so long as the humiliated subject of your disclosures is someone you never have to see again.

To clear things up, Allen tells British Vogue: “There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel”. So Allen’s tell-all tale of infidelity is a work of autofiction, not autobiography.

It’s not like Allen is doing anything new here – Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ and Beyonce’s “Becky with the good hair” come to mind – but whether this justifies putting ‘Madeline’ on blast remains debatable. What’s more, an exclusive from The Mail on Sunday released less than 48 hours after West End Girl complicates things further.

It’s one woman’s word against another; isn’t this kind of conflict modern music should have left behind by now?

Natalie Tippett, a 34-year-old costume designer and single mother from New Orleans, came forward claiming to be Allen’s ‘Madeline’ and in her interview with The Mail on Sunday, Tippett called the situation “scary”. The interview seems to confirm that Tippett even knew about her texts being used in Allen’s lyricism before the album’s release, yet Allen claims in an interview with The Times that Madeline is “a fictional character”.

It’s one woman’s word against another; isn’t this kind of conflict modern music should have left behind by now?

West End Girl is undoubtedly a technical triumph, and the speculation is certainly entertaining, but when a harmless pseudonym suddenly gains a full name and home address, shouldn’t we reconsider whether it’s right to rip off the mask?