Parasocial: a one-sided, imaginary relationship in which a person develops a strong, often intimate, connection with a media figure they do not know personally, such as a celebrity.
I’m listening to Lily Album’s new album so compulsively that I’m in that house in Brooklyn, the one we all saw in Architectural Digest. Deliciously clashing patterns: mint, lime, purple wallpaper, carpets, a bedroom without windows so my husband can sleep at night. I’m in those wedding photos in Vegas, the dress, the burgers, the joy. I’m in a play in London. I’m in the hotel room, alone on the phone. I’m lying to the kids. I’m getting more thin, more chic, sculpting my jawline into something so tight it lets no light in, so my husband can sleep at night. I look amazing. I feel like a piece of metal. I’m doing a podcast with my best friend. I’m talking frankly. I’m posting selfies. I’m dying inside.
Lily Allen’s new album, West End Girl, is a work of theatre. A musical. An exceptional record about divorce. I want to see her sing it, standing or maybe sitting to one side of the stage, with contemporary dancers interpreting it alongside. Gradually pulling her into the dance, maybe by the fourth song, the magnets of the music too strong to avoid.
But then I was never not going to adore an album with a song called Nonmonogamummy. Which, along with the other 13, is about a man who sounds an awful lot like her recent ex-husband, the American actor David Harbour, and how his sex addiction destroyed their marriage.
I wonder how he’s sleeping at night.
Female rage, what a beast. Line up: here we all are, in these songs. I’ve not been wed but I’ve been lied to by a clever man and every word rings true. It’s only one person’s side of the story, it eviscerates a person who, in my memoir writing workshops, we would say isn’t in the text to defend himself. We would advise against writing with an axe to grind. To not portray yourself as the outright victim of your own life. Yet somehow it avoids that by - not being bitter? Because actual bitterness brings your ego into the room first, but this album is led by the ache. “You’re a mess and I’m a bitch,” Lily sings, quietly, about her man. About her open marriage that is open in the same way a door is open when it slams in your face.
As the comedian Davina Bentley said recently,
“I get asked out by a lot of guys in their 40s who practise ethical non-monogamy. And for me, ethical non-monogamy is exactly like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Just because you put a describing word in front of something, it does not make it that.”
Non-monogamy as an excuse to care less, to deal with the pain less, to connect less. To connect to fifty different people to escape the one in front of you who has turned hard, which in turn has turned your dick soft. Dopamine as king, the quick fix, the quick fuck, as opposed to the long fuck that is marriage. The short attention span’s solution to a lengthy problem. ADHD as a religious doctrine. The TL/DR approach to love.
Don’t get me wrong, I know a few things about casual sex and I remain a fan, largely because it’s a fantastic way to avoid intimacy.
But this album isn’t just about one guy: it’s about the bullshit of living in a time when the woman who is fucking your husband can talk to you as if she’s writing a corporate mission statement or a university application. Language used as a weapon too reasonable to object to. Language with all of its piss taken out, to hide that it’s taking the piss.
“Lies are not something that I want to get caught up in,” says Madeline, a character on the album, about boning a famous guy who lives with two kids who are waiting for him to come home.
“I hate that you’re in so much pain right now,” says Madeline, who actually hates that she was the sun and now she is the rain.
“Love and light,” Madeline signs off.
Love and gaslight, more like.
As for David, a man who, in real life, is about to promote the new series of the Netflix drama Stranger Things by going on the most awkward press tour of his life, and who has already disabled all commenting on his socials:
“If it has to happen baby, do you want to know?” his character asks.
(Is it an open marriage if you’ve told your faithful partner this is something she has to understand about you, long after the wedding? If you’re hooked on dark dopamine? Sex as a fight with your demons; a haunting. Sex that’s only as sexy as a photograph of models having sex. A marriage that is actually closed if your heart is locked that far out of sight.)
All this in the same week that Trump started demolishing the White House, without permits, without any need (but with classic Middle Eastern or African dictator vibes - those same countries that he’d describe as shitholes); American democracy crumbling onto the lawn alongside it. Trump who was voted in not just by rednecks but also by wellness gurus and antivax fashion stylists; the fascist yoga crew who Stewart Home writes about. People who speak the same language as Madeline.
Love and light!
- - -
I should say here, I’m a longtime Lily stan, 20 years in now. I went to her first ever gig, at YoYo in Notting Hill, where she had to push her way to the stage and some girls tried to stop her because they thought she was going to block their view of Lily Allen, even though she was Lily Allen. I had been playing her MySpace demos over and over again. I’d nearly bagged her first interview for the Guardian but then Observer Music Magazine nabbed the slot from my hands.
I got my chance to interview her a couple of years later for The Times, but she was very famous by this point and we only had nine minutes. Backstage at a gig where she was painting her hands green, nervously, laughing, distracted or trying to be. I can’t remember why we only had nine minutes but I do remember that I ignored every single question on the list given to me by a male editor at The Times. “Ask her for her thoughts on weight loss,” said the email - no thanks, I’d rather die. Instead I asked about politics and power, and her quotes about the then London mayor, Boris Johnson, made it onto the front page of the paper. I don’t know if that would have happened if I’d said to her, as instructed, “So, your lyrics reference the fact that you can, it says here, ‘eat spaghetti bolognese for days and days?’”
I think I next saw her in the flesh in 2014, when Kate Bush played a run of shows and I went to the opening night. This was perhaps the most hyped concert I had ever been to, and I had got so overwhelmed by the occasion that I’d drunk too much by the interval, when I bumped into Lily and Seb Chew, her longterm ex / manager / best friend having a cigarette on the steps outside.
So we talked a bit about, obviously, how amazing Kate Bush was. “God, I hope she plays Hounds of Love,” I added. They looked at me. They were calm, quiet. They’re pretty quiet people, actually.
“But she has played Hounds of Love,” said Lily, politely, with a serious face. “It was the second song.”
I can say that, eleven years later, the excoriating shame has died down by at least 15% to a mere 85% pure agony when I think about this. (Ruminating ruminating ruminating.)
She released other records, did other things. I wrote some negative pieces about her as well. But in 2018 I got my big Lily interview. She published a memoir and I got the Guardian Weekend magazine cover feature for it. By this point she had gone into some messy places, some fucking horrible places, been an arsehole to some people I cared for, made life difficult and exciting, had a child die on her, two living kids, her first divorce, rags to riches to financial crisis a few times over in her life. God, what hadn’t happened by then.
One thing I always remember from that interview is asking if she had hired female sex workers during her first marriage because she wanted to get caught. And watching her say quite clearly no - then check herself, then try to find the truth in herself. Maybe yes? There was a lot in her sigh. Like she still wasn’t quite sure what the fuck she had done, or what the script was. She’d been high and mad and lonely and bad. But she was trying.
I’ve interviewed a lot of famous women. It felt like an extraordinary conversation.
After that we did an event together at Port Eliot Festival where we talked on stage about the book. She was anxious backstage. The man who had stalked her and got into her bedroom while her kids were asleep in the next room was getting released from prison. But she let me drink half her rider and nick her fags and posed for this photo with my mum and dad:
We went out around the festival afterwards. Sometimes she was pushing her kids around in a wheelbarrow. I don’t know how relaxing it was to hang out in those days. There was an iciness there which I think would now be better understood as neurodiversity. Or being an iconic bitch. Things started to feel weirder.
As far as I know, Lily quit drink and drugs the very next day and hasn’t relapsed since. So sometimes I feel a bit sorry for her that her last ever glass of wine was probably drunk with the world’s only music journalist capable of sitting through Kate Bush singing Hounds of Love in front of her eyes and somehow missing it.
I suppose this isn’t exactly parasocial then - I do know her. But I’m still in too deep. I’m listening to this album 47 times in a row and thinking well of course this marriage started to unravel when she got back into her own power, after some quieter years. Of course the husband starts his campaign of unseating his wife when she gets her first big job, and in his industry no less. An acting role. When she’s no longer waiting at home in the palace he built to trap her in.
(Remember the flowers he sent her, in real life? The note? )
That’s when they want to take you down, these men whose egos want to marry a famous, popular, magnetic woman - but then make sure you can be whittled down to size, staying smaller than them forever. They come for you when the attention is on you. When you suddenly get a big job.When you’re happy. When you’re launching a book. When the world is paying more attention to you than they think it should.
It’s not that men aren’t attracted to women with a big life of their own - they’re absolutely into it, as attracted as anything. But some of them sure as hell start trying to make you doubt yourself once you’re theirs.
I went to that play in London, the one she references on her opening track. Lily played a woman who lives in a house that seems to be haunted, and she goes half mad because she can’t work out what’s really going on or if she can trust her own eyes. And then it turns out it’s her own husband who is haunting their house - but she didn’t even know he was dead! She thought he was lying beside her, not haunting her from a place beyond.
I didn’t realise then that we were watching reality TV.
- - -
(I keep thinking about these relationships in which the rule, the desired outcome, is that when you fuck someone else you’re not allowed to feel anything. Is this really how people want to live? You really want to make sure your partner can fuck someone without feeling anything? Is that on the list of rules pinned to the fridge along with your kids’ screentime regulations?)
Anyway I’ve now played the whole album about 20 times like a nutter and it needs to stop, so I’m going to put on something else, something I can play without noticing.
I’m going to play Kate Bush.
This is the only kind of writing that I understand now..reactive and uncensored and cuts straight through all the noise of planned content and adverts and paywalls. Thank you for leaving it open, so people like me can catch it. Listening now 🩷
He definitely underestimated her.