Lily Allen’s ‘Revenge Album’: Why Her Marriage to David Harbour Ended

When Lily Allen married actor David Harbour in a 2020 Las Vegas ceremony officiated by an Elvis Presley impersonator, it seemed the troubled pop starlet had found her happily ever after.

But the release last Friday of Allen’s salacious fifth studio album – West End Girl – tells a different story. For among the pop-riffs and catchy hooks is a sordid tale of sexual betrayal which points a damning finger at her now ex-husband, 50-year-old Stranger Things star Harbour.

The album has sent the internet into meltdown as online sleuths scramble to piece together the unravelling of Allen and Harbour’s romance. 

Already at the top of the UK iTunes album charts, the songs have been streamed more than eight million times worldwide on Spotify since its released on Friday.

One thing is for sure, while the shockingly explicit new music has 40-year-old Allen riding high on a wave of popularity she hasn’t enjoyed since the early 2000s, Harbour has been forced into hiding, disappearing from public life and turning off the comments on his social media pages.

West End Girl is hardly an exercise in subtlety. The songs cover everything from open marriage to infidelity and vasectomies.

And this weekend, Allen gave her clearest indication yet that much of it is autobiographical, making it perhaps the most brutally honest break-up album ever.

‘Nobody knew what was going on in my life,’ Allen told The Sunday Times. ‘So I go into the studio, cried for two hours and then said, “Let’s make some music”.’

‘I don’t think I could say it’s all true – I have artistic licence,’ she adds.

‘But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.’

The Daily Mail can now reveal that the timing of the album could also be key. Netflix insiders are convinced the release date is intended to derail Harbour’s flourishing acting career just weeks before the final season of his name-making series, Stranger Things, is released.

‘The album seems very deliberately timed to undermine David ahead of the Stranger Things finale,’ commented a Netflix insider to the Daily Mail.

‘It was hugely emotional for him and the cast to bring this story to an end, and it is something he is very proud of.’

The global hit Stranger Things culminates with a two-part final series, the first episodes of which are released on November 27.

‘But there is no way that he can now be part of the press tour while this is going on,’ our insider continued. ‘It would be an utter embarrassment. It must be devastating for David that he is unable to fully participate in the final chapter of the show that made him famous.’

Stranger Things aside, Harbour – who rose to prominence in theatre in the early 2000s, including being nominated for a Tony award for his role in a revival of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? – has a bumper crop of films due to be released in the next year including the much-anticipated latest Avengers film.

But with Hollywood still reeling from it’s MeToo moment in which the sexual impropriety of male stars was laid bare, Harbour’s career now hangs in the balance.

In one track, entitled Madeline, Allen alludes to a deal she made with Harbour for how an open relationship might work, only for Harbour to renege on that agreement: ‘We had an arrangement,’ she croons.

‘Be discrete and don’t be blatant. There had to be payment. It had to be with strangers. But you’re not a stranger Madeline.’

No wonder Allen’s fans started wildly speculating at the weekend, asking: ‘Who is Madeline?’.

Yesterday, The Mail on Sunday revealed Madeline to be a pseudonym for 34-year-old single mother Natalie Tippett, a costume designer who’d worked with Harbour on the 2021 Netflix movie We Have A Ghost.

‘Of course I’ve heard the song,’ Natalie told The Mail on Sunday. ‘But I have a family and things to protect. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

‘It’s a little bit scary for me.’

Of course some will say Allen is ruthlessly cashing in on her ex-husband’s marital misdemeanours to jump start her music career. This is, after all, her first album in seven years.

A close friend of Harbour’s told the Daily Mail this weekend: ‘Lily’s hardly an angel. She gave David a totally false idea of what and who she is. She wanted the big house and the lifestyle and then she hated it.

‘Men find her hard work; there is something about her which makes them pull their hair out and run a mile. Same thing happened with her ex Sam Cooper.

‘She was advised if she wanted to sell albums then she would have to sing about David and now she’s cashing in,’ the source continued.

‘It comes from the same insecurities she has had all of her life, a lot comes from her background – being bounced from pillar to post as a child, her dad not coming home and a feeling of rejection.’

But West End Girl is more than just a few diss tracks. It’s a public evisceration surely designed not only to humiliate a man but to tarnish the career of a hugely successful actor. As Allen asks on one album track: ‘Why should I let you win?’

The story of Allen and Harbour’s tumultuous relationship begins in 2019. Allen had recently announced her split from DJ boyfriend Meridian Dan after almost four years while Harbour had made the transition from theatre actor to screen star.

Rumours of their dalliance first emerged at the start of that year, but they weren’t spotted together until later when Harbour found himself in London filming the much-maligned superhero flick Black Widow.

The pair went to the theatre together in August of that year and the following month, Allen published posted a picture of Harbour on social media with the word ‘Mine’.

By mid-October they were an item, pictured kissing in New York. A year later, on September 7, 2020, the pair tied the knot in Las Vegas.

In December of that year, Harbour described Allen as ‘a beautiful, incredible woman who I love’ and, six months later, Allen relocated to New York with her two children – Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 12 – who she had with ex-husband Sam Cooper. But it didn’t take long for the cracks to show.

In 2021, Allen was invited to star in a West End play, 2:22 A Ghost Story. But we now know that for theatre darling Harbour, his wife’s sudden ascension to the stage was a bitter pill to swallow.

When the play opened that summer, Harbour sent a bouquet of flowers to Allen’s dressing room, along with a note: ‘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.’

But while they were separated across the Atlantic, Allen says Harbour phoned her, saying he wanted to open their relationship and sleep with other women.

In an outro to the album’s title track, Allen records her response to that phone call, telling Harbour: ‘Umm… Ok. Well. I mean it doesn’t make me feel great. If that’s what you need to do, then… I guess. How will it work? Where? I mean, it makes me really sad…’

Two years later and on February 1, 2023, Harbour and Allen appeared in a feature article for Architectural Digest in which Harbour showed off his luxurious Brooklyn townhouse complete with crystal chandeliers, pink silk and Mylar wallpaper.

This townhouse, we now know, is the New York pad Allen refers to in a song called ‘Pussy Palace’.

‘I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters,’ Allen sings in the second verse of the track: ‘From broken-hearted women wishing you could have been better. Sheets pulled off the bed, they’re strewn all on the floor. Long black hair, probably from the night before.’

It isn’t clear when Harbour purchased the luxury property, only that he was likely convinced to move from his previous Manhattan apartment after a 29-year-old woman fell to her death from his window in 2015. 

Harbour was out of the country at the time and had allowed the woman – who suffered from mental health problems – to stay in the apartment, although the true nature of their relationship has remained a mystery.

The apartment, according to Allen’s lyrics, played host to a plethora of late-night visits, leading Allen to spiral with jealousy.

‘Did you kiss her on the lips and look in her eyes?’ she asks on the track ‘Ruminating’.

‘Did you have fun now that it’s done, baby won’t you tell me I’m still your number one.’

Allen told The Sunday Times that she wrote the album in just ten days in December last year.

But the couple didn’t officially announce they had split until February this year – and not before Allen herself had made an appearance on the celebrity dating app Raya under the pseudonym ‘Dallas Major’ and launched an OnlyFans account in which she sold pictures of her feet, allegedly earning her more than her Spotify music royalties.

Intriguingly, Allen is not the only person to accuse Harbour of inappropriate behaviour. In an account of time allegedly spent with Harbour seen by the Daily Mail, one woman described being flown to Vegas by the actor who then, ‘put his finger in my mouth without warning. I am laughing out loud right now at how much pressure I felt to put on the best performance of my life.’ 

Allegedly the actor went on to discuss how women’s bodies ‘weren’t the same after a second baby’.

And regardless of how much of West End Girl is autobiographical, the effect is crystal clear. For now at least, David Harbour is – as far as the internet is concerned – public enemy number one.

While Harbour has disappeared from the public eye, it’s unclear exactly where he is hiding out. Perhaps in his Brooklyn apartment, so grotesquely described by Allen.