Hell hath no fury like a singer scorned — and Lily Allen has just done to David Harbour what we all wish we could do with our cheating exes: eviscerated him in public and harpooned his career. To which I (and every woman who has ever been betrayed) say, bravo.
The singer’s revenge album (for that’s clearly what it is), West End Girl, was announced last Monday and released on Friday — and has already been streamed more than eight million times. It’s rocketed to the top of the iTunes charts and to the centre of the gossip pages; has been shared in countless women’s WhatsApp chats as we unpick the lurid details and reveal our own experiences of being misled and lied to.
It may well go down as one of the music industry’s most brutal acts of vengeance. Allen, 40, and Harbour, 50, announced their split in February after four years of marriage, and since the album’s release he has been forced into hiding. There are now questions as to whether it was all perfectly timed to derail the release of the final season of the show that made him a household name — Stranger Things — on November 27.
Tracks such as Madeline feature Allen confronting the “other woman” over text, asking: “How long has it been going on? Is it just sex or is there emotion?”
Allen and Harbour in New York in 2024
GETTY IMAGES
This week Natalie Tippett, 34, claimed she was the subject of the song, while Allen told The Sunday Times that “Madeline” isn’t an individual, but a “construct”. “I don’t think I could say it’s all true — I have artistic licence,” Allen said. “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”
Regardless, Allen revealed she had spent time at a treatment centre to deal with the “emotional turmoil” of the split, and I get it. I know exactly how she feels — because my husband left me for a younger (less successful) woman too. She was more than ten years younger — another mum he met at the school gate when our children were in the same class. He was out of work after being suddenly made redundant. I had supported him for almost a year by working full-time in a high-pressure industry while he switched roles to become a stay-at-home dad.
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He did the school drop-offs and pick-ups, went to bake sales, PTA meetings and playdates; bought tickets for school discos and attended sports day when I couldn’t, because I was too busy being the breadwinner, working 70 hours a week.
He got plaudits he simply didn’t deserve, as other mums openly swooned in front of him for being “such a good dad”; they praised him for doing the unpaid work and emotional labour women do without ever expecting to receive credit, like throwing birthday parties, buying presents and going to parents’ evenings.
No woman gets applause for babysitting — as everyone mistakenly calls it — when their husband is at a work do, yet my husband was treated like Mother Teresa, simply for being a functioning father.
The first inkling I had that something was wrong — that there was a “Madeline” on the cards — was when he started dropping her name into conversation casually, but constantly. “I saw Claire today,” he would mention while making a stir-fry, after the kids had gone to bed, following up with: “Claire was telling me this hilarious story…”. He even started watching Love Island because Claire did.
I didn’t think much of it (at first), didn’t give it more than a passing, “Oh, that’s nice,” because I was too busy worrying about the next presentation I had to give and the work trip to New York. While he dithered over which clothes to send our son in on non-uniform days, I was panicking about high-stakes meetings. Our worlds were no longer the same. And that’s where the trouble started.
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Claire, on the other hand, worked from home (of course, she did). She had time to indulge my husband with brainstorming sessions about school assemblies and raffles; with wine-fuelled playdates as they planned to man a stall together at the PTA fair.
I should have known something was up when my husband — previously antisocial to the point of being openly rude, who would stand in the corner of a party on his phone rather than make polite conversation with other husbands — started being invited to “school drinks” and actually wanted to go. I, on the other hand, was never invited. I was too busy working to provide for our family of three.
The pair married in Las Vegas in September 2020
Then, one Christmas, he had a big night out with the other mums. I was relieved; it helped to assuage my guilt about always missing bedtime with our son. I encouraged him to go and even helped him to pick out an outfit; I urged him to wear the expensive cashmere V-neck jumper in navy blue that brought out his eyes — the one I’d bought him for his birthday.
He wore it, but didn’t get home until three in the morning — he said “time had run on” at the bar. I was suspicious enough to call the pub the next day to find out what time they closed. They said midnight.
His “find my iPhone” pin, meanwhile, told me he was at a house bordering the local golf club, three roads down. When I confronted him about it, he said — his eyes wide and innocent — that he hadn’t wanted Claire to walk home by herself, that he had escorted her “for safety” and she had invited him in for a “nightcap” before he came home. “Nothing happened,” he said.
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Fast forward a few years and he now lives with Claire in that house bordering the golf club. He has always denied any crossover and said things developed into romance only after we ended. I don’t believe him. I know from our son that the day they celebrate their anniversary is the same day we decided to break up. Coincidence? I highly doubt it.
We already know that after Allen was picked to star in the play 2:22 A Ghost Story in the West End of London — giving rise to her album title — Harbour sent her flowers with a note that read: “My ambitious wife, these are bad luck flowers ’cause if you get reviewed well in this play, you will get all kinds of awards and I will be miserable. Your loving husband.”
Was Allen too successful to be faithful to? Too much of a threat to a man with a fragile ego? I think so. It happened to me too. I only wish I had the means to seek revenge, as Allen has done — a lyrical way to express my regret and circular thinking, as she does in the song Ruminating, or the anger, as she puts it so perfectly in Beg For Me: “I feel embarrassed, I feel ashamed.”
But my feelings about my ex and his girlfriend are perhaps best expressed by her song Fruityloop: “And finally I see (I see)… It’s not me, it’s you. And there is nothing I could do.”
The writer has chosen to remain anonymous