Live Review: Lily Allen – West End Girl Tour
O2, London, The Point, Dublin
Lily Allen is on her West End Girl tour, which started in Glasgow last March, and will tour Europe and North America before finishing in Perth this November. Last weekend she played in London, before doing two shows in Dublin. Mostly by accident I ended up going to both.
The show is a wholly unique take on live music. I expected a normal gig, the artist comes on, sings a few new songs, a few classics, a couple of proclamations of love for wherever the artist happens to be, London, Dublin, Brighton, Ashgabat, Saturn’s Seventh Moon, wherever, before they head off towards their next gig. Allen’s show by contrast is organised like a West End production. Even the setlist is divided into Acts I, II, and III. There is no audience interaction, no deviating from the script, and the encore is purely a curtsy while she receives flowers.
As such, the setlist was exactly the same at both, going through the entire album in order. Allen did the same movements, made the same actions. The crowd screamed and cheered at the same intervals, the phone lights came out, in lieu of lighters, at the same point in Just Enough. The same opening act, the Dallas Minor Trio, played an orchestral rendition of some of Allen’s most famous tracks. Having a cello sextet and conductor belt out Lily bangers was a fantastic idea, and worked well generally. Having the lyrics pop up like a massive karaoke show worked similarly well, and got the whole venue singing along.
Allen does not join this opening act however, and the audience were visibly disappointed about it, both in London and in Dublin. In Dublin I enjoyed the Dallas Minor Trio much more, because I knew what was coming, but the idea of essentially a cover band opening for a live act is a difficult one for an audience to grasp. The only thing missing from the otherwise excellent DMT was Lily Allen – the artist everyone had paid to come and see.
Although the two shows were identical, Allen’s attitude differed massively from one to the other. I enjoyed it more in Dublin, and so did Allen. In London, at the O2, she was in floods of tears for much of the second and third acts, causing the audience to scream and cheer in her favour, denouncing her now ex-husband and his special friend Madeline. It gave the performance a powerful feel, to see her opening up on the breakdown of her marriage in one of the cities where it happened, the city she grew up in.
Conversely, in Ireland, Allen came out at the Point in her 2006-era best, cheeky and smiling and joking and having fun, a more controlled, sober version of her old-school self. The last time Allen came to Dublin it was right after the infamous handball incident with Thierry Henry that prevented Ireland from joining the World Cup (yes, it is World Cup season, all roads lead to football). Before belting out Fuck You, Allen told the audience it was aimed at Henry, which made her an immediate fan-favourite. She was welcomed back like the superstar she is. In both shows she gave the audience what they wanted.
West End Girl is an interesting album, and it has received slightly Marmite responses from reviewers. The album is important, groundbreaking, and tremendously well-received – but is it any good? West End Girl seems like it was written all in one go, in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s affair. It’s chaotic and overpersonal and intense. The performances, by contrast, were anything but rushed. Allen was professional and impressive throughout. Regular costume changes, impressive set design and a demonstration of her acting talents all showed that West End Girl is more than just an album tour, it is a piece of theatre. Allen wears her emotions for all to see, pulling the audience through every step of her finding out about her husband’s adultery and the subsequent aftereffects.
Most of the negative responses to West End Girl I’ve heard have been from men. One of those men was, before I saw it live, myself. I am fully aware it is possible this album is just too intelligent for our tiny, male, testosterone-filled minds. We cannot compute feelings or emotions, or in fact anything beyond the current World Cup (yes, football again). Jokes aside, a male friend told me they reacted viscerally to the album when it came out, the descriptions of deceit and lies reminding him of the struggle he went through with his alcoholic father. Even if you are a man, or you’ve not been cheated on, or you’ve never gotten married, the intense humanness of the album is powerfully relatable. The album makes much more sense live, the professionalism Allen brings to the performance means the chaotic nature of the album is ironed out into an organised mania.
My only real issue was the openers. Great as they were, it would have been a much better show had Allen returned for an encore and sung a few of her classics with her cellist accompaniment, rather than letting them play for an hour sans-Allen. What a fantastic show that would have been, reinventing herself while still giving the audience what they wanted. It makes sense once you’ve seen the whole gig (twice) for her to not be present at the start, but it was disappointing at first. Regardless of how well the cellists played, the audience wanted Lily.
Allen has been a huge influence on music in the 21st Century. Olivia Rodriguo is an ardent disciple, oftentimes citing Allen as a key influence, but the list is far-reaching. Would there even be Kate Nash, Paloma Faith, Duffy, or Lola Leng if there hadn’t been Lily to light the way? Allen was wearing dresses with trainers, getting blacked out at Carnival and headlining Glasto a long time before Charli XCX gave that kind of carry-on a name. Allen was experimenting with autotune and alt-pop with Sheezus years before Pink Pantheress opened her laptop. In fact, looking at just about every female, London-based singer since 2006, if they weren’t influenced by Amy Winehouse, they were influenced by Lily Allen. Many male artists are likewise influenced by her, just less public about the admission – the fragile male ego is alive and well, afterall.
It is possible that there is some bias in my championing of Lily Allen. I, like Allen, grew up on Ladbroke Grove. She, like Joe Strummer before her and AJ Tracey after, was and is and always will be regarded as a sort of semi-deity in NW London. The Big L, I call her. She calls me That weird bloke who tells everyone we are mates because we met once for five seconds.
Bias aside, if anything, Allen has become more influential since her peak in the 00s. West End Girl has resonated with audiences terrifically. It has undeniably caused waves across the global music scene. Watching the almost exclusively female crowd in London and Dublin screaming in near ecstasy as the West London star belted out her new album start to finish silenced any doubters on that front. Unabashed, unashamed, unfiltered, Allen opens the door to her personal life in a way that is seldom seen in music. She has often sung personal songs deeply based on her own life, and this album is a continuation of that. If anything, West End Girl is a distillation of that part of her work. Lily Allen is the gift that keeps on giving.
Images: Getty
Originally published in The Splice Magazine, July 2, 2026