Madeline’s Birthday: Love Rival Celebrates by Mocking Lily Allen’s Affair

The real ‘Madeline’ – the woman at the heart of Lily Allen’s brutal break-up album West End girl, celebrated her birthday at the weekend as she turned 35.

Natalie Tippett, a mother-of-one and costume designer who admitted to having an affair with Lily’s now ex-husband David Harbour, was given the pseudonym ‘Madeline’ in Lily’s songs.

And celebrating her big day, Natalie reposted some birthday messages from friends who poked fun at the Madeline reference.

One friend shared a picture of Natalie working out alongside a cartoon of Madeline from the children’s book by Ludwig Bemelmans and a picture of a building called The Madeline, with Natalie adding a laughing face emoji. 

The post came after Lily herself had dressed up as the character for Halloween.  

Natalie also shared another post from a friend which read: ‘Happy birthday Mad – I mean Natalie!!!!’

Taking to her grid Natalie shared two images of herself cuddling her little girl, whose face she had obscured, simply writing the caption: ’35.’

She also reposted a picture of herself drinking a glass of champagne and some bikini selfies. 

Lily’s acclaimed album recounts in painful detail the break-up of her four-year marriage to Stranger Things star David and devoted much of her lyrical ire to his infidelity with a secret lover.

The brutally raw lyrics left no room for doubt – ‘Madeline’ was the other woman in her marriage to him.

They reveal Lily confronted her by text to ask: ‘How long has it been going on? Is it just sex or is there emotion?’

The star’s millions of fans took to social media en masse, hungrily asking just who Madeline was – or, as Lily put in lyric form – ‘Who the f*** is Madeline?’

It immediately drew comparisons with a track on Beyonce’s 2016 album Lemonade, which launched worldwide speculation about the identity of ‘Becky with the good hair’ – a woman who allegedly had an affair with Jay-Z.

And while Lily has been at pains to point out that Madeline is, just like Becky, a pseudonym, it has prompted a similar hunt for the real woman who inspired the song and several others on Lily’s rage-filled album, her first in seven years.

But it was The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the identity of ‘Madeline’ as  Natalie.

The single mother, who lives in New Orleans, spoke to the newspaper from her home in the city’s historic Treme district to admit that she was the woman at the heart of Allen’s new album – and at the centre of her marriage break-up.

‘Of course I’ve heard the song,’ Natalie had said, rolling her eyes.

‘But I have a family and things to protect. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I understand this is going on. It’s a little bit scary for me.’

It is understood that Natalir met 50-year-old David , who is 16 years her senior, while filming the Netflix movie We Have A Ghost in 2021, on location in New Orleans.

David was the movie’s leading man, while Natalie worked in the costume department. Their affair reportedly began shortly after shooting started.

David had married Lily, who has two daughters, Ethel, 13, and 12-year-old Marnie from her previous marriage to Sam Cooper, in Las Vegas the year before.

Even after filming ended, Harbour reportedly flew Natalie to his home in Atlanta, Georgia, as the affair continued behind Lily’s back.

But his secret fling was exposed when Allen saw an incriminating text message on his mobile phone, and as her marriage fell apart she turned her heartache into music.

In the song Tennis on her new album, Allen sings of coming home to find a sexual text on her partner’s phone.

‘So I read your text, and now I regret it,’ she laments. ‘I can’t get my head round how you’ve been playing tennis. If it was just sex, I wouldn’t be jealous. You won’t play with me and who’s Madeline?’

In the song Madeline, Allen even changes her voice to mimic Natalie’s, insisting that her relationship with Harbour ‘has only ever been about sex. I can promise you that this is not an emotional connection’.

Natalie spoke to this newspaper from the living room of her historic clapboard home, which is decorated with glowing neon signs and elegant furnishings.

Her toddler daughter bounced around the room happily in a rainbow-coloured tutu.

She nods sadly when asked if she knew her private text messages were being used in the lyrics of Allen’s songs.

‘Yeah,’ she sighed. ‘I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it at the moment.’

Lily and David announced their split in January after just over four years of marriage. It is understood they separated in December, and that Lily spent Christmas alone with her children in Kenya, 3,000 miles from David.

Speaking on her Miss Me? podcast with her long-time friend, presenter Miquita Oliver, that month, she admitted that she was taking ‘time out’ and was struggling with panic attacks.

She said: ‘I’m finding it hard to be interested in anything. I’m really not in a good place. I know I’ve been talking about it for months, but I’ve been spiralling and spiralling. It’s got out of control. I can’t concentrate on anything except the pain I’m going through. It’s really hard.’

A source claimed that Lily was ‘devastated’ and had reportedly checked into an £8,000-a-week trauma treatment centre after telling friends she was close to a nervous breakdown.

She also gave an interview to British Vogue this month in which she discussed how hard it was not to rely on ‘drugs and alcohol’ to get through the split.

The singer, who has been sober for five years, admitted in an interview that her addictions had been so bad that she couldn’t remember ever having ‘sober sex’ until her relationship with Harbour. She said her earliest memories had involved drink and drugs, and that she had watched her father, the actor Keith Allen, snort cocaine.

Referring to the split with David, she told Vogue: ‘The last time that I felt anything like that, drugs and alcohol were my way out, so it was excruciating to sit with those [feelings] and not to use them.’

Meanwhile Harbour, asked about the split by GQ magazine in April, declined to reveal much, saying it would encourage ‘a salacious s***-show of humiliation’.

The Mail on Sunday reported earlier this year that Lily had turned detective after suspecting David of cheating.

Lily’s circle of London friends said the singer had believed since last autumn that her husband was interested in other women.

The couple, who had met on the celebrity dating app Raya, had disabled their profiles following a whirlwind romance.

But Lily decided to re-join the app to check on her husband’s activity – and discovered he had a secret profile which had been active for around a month.

In it, he describes himself as ‘visiting New York from Atlanta’ and a ‘closet nerd that plays tough guys on your TV’. His profile song is listed as the Houses Of The Holy by Led Zeppelin.

A source said at the time: ‘Lily was looking for women that were on Raya and cross-referencing them with women David follows on Instagram to try to figure out who he was seeing.’

By the time the couple broke up, however, she had become convinced that he had a secret girlfriend, which later proved to be correct.

The source added: ‘Lily has never even looked at anyone since she met David. She is devastated.’

David shared a townhouse in Brooklyn, New York, with Lily and her children after the couple moved there in 2020. She had enrolled her daughters in local schools.

He also bought a home 800 miles away in Atlanta to be closer to the Stranger Things filmset, where he was filming the fifth and final series last year.

Since the split, Lily has moved back to London and has bought an ex-council flat in a building near where she grew up.

She said: ‘I have wanted to live in this building since I was a baby, it’s been a dream of mine forever and finally a flat became available in here and I was in a position to buy it and I did.’