Review of the Week: Lily Allen on tour

Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 3 March

The clue was always in the title. West End Girl, Lily Allen’s tour-de-force tell-all album about the breakdown of her fairytale marriage, was written like a film or a play, with each scene gaining he-did-what-now??!! momentum. The second sign that the live version was not going to be your average pop gig was the announcement of a concert-hall run. Then came the support act of three cellists called the Dallas Minor Trio, opening for Allen by covering her past hits with the lyrics on a screen for an audience singalong, a sort of subversive Christmas carol service gearing everyone up for a big girls night out. Finally, ice cream vendors pop up at the interval before Allen hits the stage – grab your tubs and tiny spoons, they signal, it’s going to be an old-school kinda show. 

Allen’s 2025 album was the bounce-back that landed her on the pop culture frontline. It peaked at No 2 in the UK, her highest-selling album in over a decade, and topped Best of 2025 lists. In Britain, her celebrity had tended to overshadow her musicality. But in recent years Allen has been championed by gen-Z stars such as Olivia Rodrigo and gained a much larger fanbase, especially in America, and the public has got to know her on her own terms through her successful podcast with childhood friend Miquita Oliver. West End Girl, written over two weeks in LA, was juicier than any gossip page anyway: a work of astonishing autofiction about infidelity, addiction, toxic masculinity and modern dating that had everyone googling what a dōjō was. It had the tongue-in-cheek realness that Allen’s been doing since her 2006 debut Alright, Still, but with a gut-punching emotional porousness. 

So how to translate that naked vulnerability to the stage? The title track mentions Allen getting the lead in a West End show to her former husband’s dismay (2:22 A Ghost Story, which earned her an Olivier Best Actress nomination in 2022). Now, she’s created her own. Last year, Self Esteem turned her album A Complicated Woman into a theatrical extravaganza with her all-singing, all-dancing ensemble. Allen’s done the opposite: she’s alone onstage under the spotlight, trapped within the four walls of a lavishly decorated bedroom, referencing her infamous Architectural Digest home-tour video. She appears as a beehived 1960s starlet, stripping down to a Chanel negligee and singing (very beautifully, despite the vocal effects) over a booming backing track.

The camp kitschiness is brilliant, evoking the lonely bombshell imagery of photographer Juno Calypso by way of Harold Pinter. During a reenactment of Allen’s telephone skit from the album, the audience supportively heckles “you’re too good for him”. Later a pair of mannequin legs fall out of a retro fridge and feather dusters go flying. There are some ingenious meta moments bordering on performance art, such as, for 4chan Stan, when Allen wraps herself, and then her head, in a sheet printed with the receipts of all the items her husband reportedly bought for other women. A quick outfit change and we’re into leather hotpants and a lace body for Pussy Palace, where Allen empties sex toys out of a placcy bag, the glamorous fantasy versus the tawdry truth. She ends the show in a Morticia-style dress, a vamp reborn.

These are fun set-pieces among the ennui: there’s only so much watching someone pace around a room you can take, a bit like leaving the OnlyFans camera on and forgetting it’s there. After a few songs, the towering-spike-heels-to-pink-shag-carpet ratio starts to give me anxiety about trip hazards; they seem to hold Allen back from really letting loose during the upbeat dance numbers like Ruminating and Dallas Major. She delivers a knowingly simplistic 90s-style dance routine for Nonmonogamummy at the front of the stage for some light relief, but all the pensive dramatics elsewhere don’t translate so well when there isn’t a screen to see her in close-up. 

There’s real bravery in delivering this performance solo. However icky it sounds, and however much she is also acting into it, we are watching her relive her betrayal in real-time. But sometimes the props just get in the way: for the stunning Just Enough, a searing track about being given just enough love to hold on to, a beaded curtain surrounds her face and gorgeous vocals, obscuring any potential for real connection.

Anna Fleischle, Allen’s production designer and co-creative director, has said that the set is “playing with the idea of what we think we know about a person’s life – especially when we’ve seen their home in magazines – creating a false sense of familiarity, while forgetting that we never truly know what someone might be going through behind closed doors.” In the same way, pretty much everyone who’s heard it has projected a lot on to West End Girl the album – that it’s a mic drop, an act of revenge, the ultimate fuck-you. Allen said herself in an interview: “I wanted it to feel brutal and tragic, but also empowering, that there was joy in being able to express it.” 

Perhaps that’s what I found missing the most. Instead of seeing Allen sitting forlornly at the end of the bed, I was hoping for some sort of cathartic climax, a joyful empowerment that never really came. The audience leave the hall looking bemused, but deep in chatter. Some can be heard muttering “well I didn’t expect that”; others, like the mother sitting next to us with her daughter, had been moved to tears. Lily Allen, our West End Girl, as divisive as ever. In some ways, that’s always been her biggest USP and what we knew all along.

Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.