Nothing classes up a joint like some folding chairs. For Lily Allen’s Wednesday night show, a few seated sections were cordoned off from the long, flat expanse of the Armory in downtown Minneapolis, not a customary practice. This was meant to signal that we were witnessing a theatrical production—albeit the kind in which the star discovers a Duane Reade bag stuffed with sex toys and eventually dons a pink apron emblazoned “CUCK.”
“Lily Allen Presents West End Girl” was just what the tour title promised—the 41-year-old British pop star/actress performing her 2025 album, head-to-toe, solo, along with backing tracks. But Allen’s first U.S. tour in seven years was no stripped-down affair. This was a true production with elaborate sets, props, costumes, lighting, and the title in elegant cursive neon atop the proscenium. Oh, and also a plot.
West End Girl is what we used to call a concept album, or maybe even a rock opera. You remember those, right? They usually involved heroic but misunderstood young men with guitars taking a stand, and they were often a bit of a mess dramatically, but hey, it was the ambition that counted. Allen says she was inspired by the Streets’ semi-comic 2004 narrative album, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, in which everyman British rapper Mike Skinner hunts down £1,000 he misplaced. I've always admired Skinner for undercutting the grandiosity of the rock opera, and that’s a lineage I’m happy to see expanded upon.
Allen’s narrative, about the dissolution of a marriage between a woman (we’ll call her Lily) and her sexually insatiable husband (we’ll call him Stranger Things star David Harbour), is too taut to Jenga these songs out of their accompanying structure. So why not just present the album as the musical theater piece it already is? No “Hello, Minneapolis!” or boilerplate expression of gratitude or encore of the hits or explanation of what we were in for, just Allen telling her story, runtime just shy of an hour.
The evening began, theatrically enough, with an overture. A string sextet interpreted Allen’s back catalog as lyrics flashed up on screens to the sides of the stage. There was a particularly rowdy singalong to 2008’s “Fuck You,” which has a chipper melody that would have worked for Oliver! and lyrics that give the bigots and warmongers of the world what for. No, it’s hardly a dated number—Allen performed it at Glastonbury with Olivia Rodrigo in 2022 to protest the Dobbs decision’s gutting of Roe v. Wade.
Then Allen herself passed through a teal curtain, exuding sex and glamor in a tight dress of a color that straight men are biologically incapable of describing. If her look when she emerged in the ’00s leaned toward “girl whose outfit must have seemed all right three hours and many pints ago,” this was a middle-aged divorcée flaunting what she's got. And, let’s be frank, what she bought—she looked hot, she looked confident, but, above all, she looked expensive.
Allen crammed a Cher’s-worth of costume changes into the show’s single hour. When she sang “You made me your Madonna/I want to be your whore” during “Sleepwalking,” she shucked her dress off with burlesque gusto at the final word, revealing an even tighter, even slinkier body suit underneath. She slipped into a silky old-Hollywood style bathrobe and reading specs. A cute pale green fit of go-go boots, fuzzy tummy-baring sweater, and hot pants was in store for later, And then there was that apron.
Since West End Girl is a play of sorts, a quick plot summary is in order: Just after Allen and her new husband buy a Brooklyn brownstone, she’s cast in a play back in London (“West End Girl”). This transatlantic separation is tough on Dave's dick, and he suggests that he might need to engage in the occasional tryst with a sex worker (“Ruminating”). Allen tearfully goes along with this plan (“Sleepwalking”), only to learn that he’s been hooking up steadily with one woman (“Tennis”) with whom she then communicates (“Madeline”). In response, Allen nearly turns to drugs and alcohol (“Relapse”).
She decides to spend the night at Harbour’s West Village bachelor apartment, which turns out to be a sex den (“Pussy Palace”). Though disgusted with her husband (“4chan Stan”), Allen commits to opening up her side of the marriage (“Nonmonogamummy”). After laments about how Harbour leads her on (“Just Enough”), she even tries out the dating apps under an alias (“Dallas Major”). The home stretch of the album covers Allen acknowledging her own needs (“Beg for Me”), reaching her limit (“Let You W/In”), and finally calling the whole thing off (“Fruityloop”). And... curtain.
Far from a love story, then, West End Girl has the shape of a horror movie, wherein our heroine descends, against all rational motives, into the dark basement of a doomed relationship. Audiences have picked up on this and have begun shouting advice at the stage. During the title track, when Allen and Harbour (unheard) talk by phone, and she breaks down in tears, then is met with shouts of “You’re too good for him” and a bellow of “Fuck that guy!”
As for that audience, most American listeners haven’t considered Allen, who’s never exactly been a star here, much at all for a decade or more. But these fans (gals and gays, like you had to ask) were there for this album, and didn’t seemed miffed that Allen excluded her older stuff.
The set design, wonderfully, is based in part on the decor of the couple’s actual Carroll Gardens brownstone, which sold for $7 million in January. There was a bed and a sofa for Allen to lounge upon, and a pink Smeg refrigerator from which she pulled items such as a Minnesota license plate and a vape she stole a puff from. Allen wrapped herself in an oversized facsimile of a sales receipt and sang from within a literal gilded cage. And once the marriage had deteriorated, the set did too, the furniture replaced with an eerie series of chandeliers and hanging lampshades.
A big difference between West End Girl and most modern musical theater: Allen and her co-writers know how to craft pop songs. Written in L.A. over the course of 10 days with collaborators Hayley Gene Penner, Chloe Angelides, and Violet Skies, all 14 of these cuts boast a memorable lyrical hook. “If it has to happen, baby/Do you want to know?” “Da da da da/Who’s Madeline?” “I thought it was a dojo/I didn’t know it was a pussy palace.” And so on. Even if you didn’t know these songs going in, there’s a fair chance you’d recall at least half going out.
Allen worked with a slew of the producers on the album, and the variety of styles they’d concocted complemented each other live. The samba-lite accompaniment of the title track was brusquely thumped by the low-end of the drum ‘n’ bass-powered “Ruminating.” The flamenco touches of “Madeline,” the gruff ragga of “Nonmonogamommy,” the sample of Lumidee’s "Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)" that runs through “Beg for Me” seasoned Allen’s retro pop base.
This tour wound up in Armory-like venues after downsizing from an arena tour that proved too optimistic for most cities. At times I wondered how this would have played at an arena scale, or if it was better suited to the State or the Orpheum. But honestly it feels like either would have worked at a grander or more intimate scale. A more barebones version would have worked at a cabaret even.
Allen’s gotten good marks for the album and the tour. Still, I wonder if the way these songs one-up the typical pop star’s coy references to past lovers, by zeroing in with autobiographical thoroughness on one target, has led some to underestimate her achievement. A celebrity tell-all this may be; a celebrity indulgence this isn’t. For all Allen’s bluntness and bravado, West End Girl is a heartbreak album, not the collective trauma dump The Guardian’s critic believed she witnessed. For all the album’s delights, it can be painful to watch Allen works her way toward “And finally I see, it’s not me, it’s you.” Because we outsiders see all the warning signs along the way. Because we outsiders know we’ve ignored them too.
Setlist
West End Girl
Ruminating
Sleepwalking
Tennis
Madeline
Relapse
Pussy Palace
4chan Stan
Nonmonogamummy
Just Enough
Dallas Major
Beg for Me Play
Let You W/In
Fruityloop
