One can make quite a sport of dredging the depths of Tripadvisor, seeking the site’s most exquisite displays of entitlement and pettiness. Consider the luxury Caribbean hotel lambasted because a fellow guest was spotted wearing shorts in the lobby, or the restaurant in Manchester that was criticised for its location “under a scary bridge”. Or even the poor old Great Wall of China, brushed off with a cursory “Too long, I didn’t even bother.”
Such reviews sprung to mind this week when reading the disappointed responses to Lily Allen’s recent run of shows. Since early Spring, Allen has been promoting her 2025 album West End Girl, beginning with a series of intimate performances at smaller theatres, such as The London Palladium and Symphony Hall in Birmingham, before transferring to larger venues, including Madison Square Garden in New York and the Motorpoint Arena in Nottingham.
The reviews have been quite rapturous. “It’s certainly an unusual arena show,” wrote the Guardian, “but as a discourse on power in relationships, and perhaps even the emptiness of celebrity, it’s compelling stuff.”
Still, it was not to the liking of some concertgoers. Following Allen’s second night at the O2 Arena in London, at the weekend, one fan took to X: “No support act,” he posted, “arrived on stage at 9:10pm, all wrapped up by 10pm, not one word to the audience, £86 to sit in the gods.”
West End Girl was one of the most celebrated albums of last year. Inspired by the collapse of Allen’s marriage to the actor David Harbour, it was a musical tour de force, by turns gut-wrenching and gossip-worthy, funny and ferocious. To capture the record in a live setting was always going to require some consideration; after all, the new material would not sit easily amid Allen’s previous hits—it was too self-contained and too devastating.
Last year, in an interview with Elle magazine, the singer explained how she had devised a concept for the upcoming performances—they would feel “more like a Broadway-esque one-woman show,” she said, “with really interesting set design. There’ll be no band and no dancers.”
The evening is carefully structured. Before Allen takes to the stage, The Dallas Minor Trio perform string arrangements of some of Allen’s earlier hits—among them, “Smile”, “LDN”, “The Fear” and “Not Fair”, their lyrics projected onto a backdrop. When Allen does appear, she moves with poise and perfect theatricality, performing the West End Girl’s 14 songs chronologically. She does not talk to the audience, just as Lady Macbeth rarely breaks from her guilt-stained ravings in Act V to thank the audience for coming and wish them a safe journey home.
Still, the complaints raise an interesting issue: what do we expect from a pop performance? If Springsteen plays for under three hours, do we feel short-changed? Must McCartney play “Yesterday”? How much do we believe a musician owes us for our £86 and our fandom?
Last Autumn, a study by the digital marketing company Dark Horse found an 80.5 per cent increase in ticket prices since 2021. Simultaneously, a Music Venue Trust investigation found that the UK’s small music venues are closing at a rate of two a week. Something in these physical and economic shifts has altered, I suspect, how we feel about a night out watching live music. It’s no longer a casual punt on a night at a local venue—low cover charge, band whose name you’ve heard once or twice. Rather, it’s something closer to an investment: the average price of a gig ticket is now £105.60. Considerably more than the average monthly electricity bill.
For this handsome sum, we anticipate a grand spectacle. Bells, whistles, lasers and confetti canons. We want our favourite songs on the setlist. Perhaps some pyrotechnics, some entertaining choreography, costume changes and a little crowd interaction. We want to see the monkey dance.
West End Girl is an album that details Allen’s attempts to shape herself to meet another’s desires—to prostrate and compromise herself so that someone might continue to love her. It’s the story of how, in so doing, she sublimated not only her own needs, but her own wants.
It’s peculiar to see echoes of this dynamic in Allen’s relationship with her audiences—if she is to keep them happy, she must do what they want. Otherwise, they will punish her by shaming her on social media, as if she were a luxury hotel or a restaurant rather than an artist.
West End Girl opens with its title track. It recounts how, shortly after Allen and her daughters had relocated from the UK to Brooklyn to be with Harbour, she was offered a coveted acting role. “I said, ‘I got some good news, I got the lead in a play,’” she sings. “That’s when your demeanour started to change.”
It’s hard not to notice how, night after night, Allen now casts herself as the lead in a play. May we all try hard not to let our demeanour change.
