Talk about living in the Upside Down.
It’s not often a celebrity airs their dirtiest laundry in public. But singer Lily Allen shocked everyone last Friday with her new album “West End Girl,” which appears to present everything you ever wanted to know — and much, much more — about why her marriage to “Stranger Things” star David Harbour went off the rails.
“I found a shoebox full of handwritten letters from brokenhearted women,” she sings on “Pu–y Palace,” a song about visiting a partner’s secret hook-up apartment. “Sheets pulled off the bed … Long black hair, probably from the night before/ Duane Reade bag with the handles tied/ Sex toys … lube inside/ Hundreds of Trojans … How’d I get caught up in your double life?”
Social media went crazy over the weekend, with cyber sleuths picking apart the lyrics and Gwyneth Paltrow calling the record a “masterpiece.”
Page Six has reached out to Harbour for comment. He has not yet publicly spoken about the record, which is earning “The Fear” singer the best reviews she’s received in years.
“The thing about Lily, the thing that makes her so special is that she is a survivor,” a London music insider who has worked with Allen told The Post — adding that “Lily is not an easy person, she’d be the first to tell you that.”
Allen, 40, has been careful over the past few days, saying the lyrics are a “mixture of fact and fiction.”
She and Harbour, 50, met on the dating app Raya wed in 2020 and confirmed their split last February — two years after showing off their Cobble Hill home in a much-shared Architectural Digest story and video.
That home has just gone up for sale for nearly $8 million. Allen starts off the album singing about the fairy tale of setting up home in a Brooklyn brownstone “I could never afford.” In the title song, things start to sour when she lands a role in a play on London’s West End.
In August 2021, Allen played Jenny in “2: 22: A Ghost Story.”
The song gives a one-sided conversation in which she seems to be told her partner wants an open marriage while she is away — and she reluctantly goes along with it because “I want you to be happy.”
In real life, Allen posted on social media a photo of the message Harbour sent with flowers for her debut.
“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’ll be miserable, your loving husband,” he wrote.
Allen told The Sunday Times this week: “There are usually agreed-upon boundaries in relationships. But whether those boundaries are adhered to or not is becoming a grey area all of a sudden. Dating apps make people disposable … there’s so much more to choose from — right in your pocket.”
On the song “Madeline,” Allen sings, “We had an arrangement/ Be discreet and don’t be blatant/ There had to be payment/ It had to be with strangers.”
She then details how that agreement was broken when the partner in the song got involved with a woman who wasn’t a stranger — and sings on the song “Tennis” of finding a text exchange with that woman on her partner’s phone.
The Daily Mail has named the real-life “Madeline” as Natalie Tippett, a costume designer from New Orleans who reportedly met Harbour in 2021 on the set of the Netflix movie “We Have A Ghost.”
Tippett told The Mail: “Of course I’ve heard the song. 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.”
When asked if she had known Allen was going to mention her text messages, Tippett replied, “Yeah, I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it at the moment.”
Allen, meanwhile, has insisted that “Madeline” is a fictional character who is a “construct of others.”
“There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel,” she told the Sunday Times.
It’s not the first time the British singer has opened up about her life, having written about — both in songs and her 2018 memoir — her broken first marriage to property developer Sam Cooper, with whom she shares daughters Ethel, 13, and Marnie, 12; the heartbreaking stillbirth of her son in 2010; and her struggles with addiction and an eating disorder.
Her split with Harbour led Allen to fear she would relapse. “It got really, really, really bad,” she told Vogue.. “The feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong. 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 use them.”
She put herself into a residential facility after feeling, “That I wanted to die.”
In April, GQ asked Harbour about rumors he or Allen had strayed in the marriage. “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole,” he said at the time.
Allen recorded the new album in just 16 days and is now getting the kind of acclaim she hasn’t seen since the early days of her career after debuting with 2006’s “Alright Still.
“She felt that Universal [her old music label] didn’t treat her well,” the insider said. “But the love for this album is f—ing insane.”
The singer has not yet finalized a divorce from Harbour, although she refers to him in interviews as her ex-husband. Asked about the tell-all album, she told Perfect magazine: “If what you’re doing isn’t provocative, what’s the f—ing point? And if it’s not scary, what’s the point? I’m not here to be mediocre.”
