Lily Allen’s Brilliant Break Up Album
Portrait of Lily Allen. Cover art illustration from West End Girl by Nieves González
I can’t stop listening to West End Girl, Lily Allen’s brilliant break-up album. The English poet and pop diva is a mistress of the seemingly casual but utterly precise lyric.
Allen’s always seemed really real, gritty, authentic. She managed to hang on to some kind of street-cred even when life bore her up to the one percent. That down-to-earth quality is hardly surprising: she’s a Taurus, with a North Node also in Taurus, which means she must express that earthy self.
Sadly, there’s no birth time, but you can see that she was born with a fascinating conjunction of Lilith — revenge, independence, betrayal — and Psyche, the storyteller. Even her jaunty debut single Smile, all those years ago, was a mean-girl song, which told a satisfying little tale of revenge.
This album, West End Girl, is an, at times sordid, detailed, narration of a break up — from the first request for an open relationship to finding the bag of condoms in his “Pussy Palace” to the realisation that his problems are his to fix.
Lily Allen’s chart — no birth time. This is a noon chart.
The verbal precision is clearly that needle-sharp conjunction of Venus and Mercury in fiery Aries. You often see these two, art and words, working together in the charts of poets. But Allen’s wit is further sharpened by her Mars in Gemini, the sign of the wordsmiths and story-makers. This puts Mars and Mercury in mutual reception, which makes them both stronger. She certainly has a talent for the mot juste, and wields words as weapons.
And there’s also a great clarity in her actual delivery, which this conjunction in Aries can deliver also. Allen foregrounds the lyrics of her songs, so you can’t miss a single syllable. Every word she speaks or sings is crystalline. On this album, she skewers her ex with an icicle.
West End Girl — which will surely secure its place as one of the all-time great break up soundtracks along with Blue, Albatross, Jagged Little Pill to name a few — was recorded as Lilith made her way through Libra, the sign of coupling and uncoupling too, and released when Lilith arrived in Allen’s opposite sign Scorpio, the sign of sex, secrets and revenge itself (and right in the middle of Scorpio season).
Allen takes aim at her ex-partner and gives him both barrels, wrapped in gauzy, dreamy, romantic tunes. And that is always the irony of Allen’s music. The venom of her words is concealed within a fluffy haze of beautiful sound. I think this may be a function of the perfect sextile between Neptune (music) and Pluto (him again) which points straight at Mars in Gemini (those dangerous, precise words. This yod is like a shotgun.
It’s notable that the reasons for the failure of this marriage seem to have revolved around sex and ownership — Taurus-Scorpio concerns. One chorus is: “Am I dealing with a sex addict?” And the stand-out opposition in Allen’s chart is between planets in Taurus and Scorpio. This is not her first venture into this territory, but perhaps it’s her most complete. She may get down and dirty that Taurus-Scorpio axis, but she purifies herself through art (Hygiea-Venus).
Part of the story that has gripped the fevered hive mind is a video of her shared home made by Architectural Digest. Watching it is an inexpressibly uncomfortable, through the keyhole, experience: you may have to wash afterwards. But it’s an interesting glimpse into a home designed for Venus in Taurus (Allen’s ex) meets Sun in Taurus (Allen herself) — of the very worst kind. Everything in the house is plushy, cushioned, beflowered, expensive. The house has been turned into a sort of tawdry fantasy of pointless and uncomfortable luxury. And the two celebrities allowing us into their shared life are actually shilling for various interiors companies. An aspect of the split addressed only indirectly on the album is somebody’s greed — more sex, more stuff, more money.
David Harbour might have known he was playing with fire, cheating on a mistress of the musical take-down, but then again, as a New Moon Aries, maybe he it never occurred to him.
It’s both brutal and elegant and there is not one bit of victimhood in it either (the album) – it’s a new kind of note for a new time.