Lily Allen’s latest album, “West End Girl,” is largely focused on the end of her four-year marriage to David Harbour. Though the “Stranger Things” star has yet to address any of her accusations, Allen has made her case: she and Harbour had an open marriage, and the actor still violated a lot of their rules.
“There are usually agreed-upon boundaries in relationships,” she told The Times in an interview published Saturday. “But whether those boundaries are adhered to or not is becoming a grey area all of a sudden. Dating apps make people disposable and that leads to the idea that if you are not happy, there’s so much more to choose from — right in your pocket.”
The pair met in 2019 and married in 2020, and the singer moved herself and her daughters to New York.
On the record Allen sings of “having an arrangement” with Harbour to “be discreet” and that extramarital relationships had to be with strangers in the song “Tennis,” which is about seeing a notification from someone named Madeline on her ex-husband’s phone.
“I just feel we are living in really interesting times — in terms of how we define intimacy and monogamy, people being disposable or not,” she continued. “The way we are being intimate with each other is changing as humans … Lots of young women are not finding the idea of marriage or even a long-term relationship that attractive any more.”
But she’s also quick to say that this might not be a negative thing. “Lots of people from my parents’ generation stayed together for ever and were miserable. You didn’t have endless choice so you may have worked at something harder. But now you don’t have to,” Allen added.
Despite being in such a public relationship, she also said “nobody knew what was going on in my life” during recording, and “I got into the studio, cried for two hours and then said, ‘Let’s make some music.’”
Allen ultimately stops short of saying everything on the album is fact. “I don’t think I could say it’s all true — I have artistic licence,” she told the outlet. “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”
Read the interview with Lily Allen at The Times.
