Review: Lily Allen’s West End Girl - O2 Arena, London, Saturday 27th June 2026
There’s a line in Lily Allen’s 2018 memoir, My Thoughts Exactly, where she laments a dodgy booking agent’s deal: ‘I’m Lily Allen, not Coldplay or Pink Floyd. I can’t fill a huge arena night after night.’
Fast forward eight years later, and I’ve just seen Allen’s second of three sold-out nights at London’s O2, as part of a wider sold-out UK, US, EU and Aus tour for her 2025 critically acclaimed divorce journal West End Girl, which sparked a ticket-grabbing frenzy, and instantly sold out her Mighty Hoopla festival appearance.
Propelling fans into a velvety lusciousness of a bedroom, lounge, and kitchen, the O2 gets a deep-dive into Allen’s mind as she croons and caresses her way through the album with the purring prowess of a Bond girl in-the-making.
Traversing through the universes of a theatre stage (a nod and wink to her stints in London’s theatrical West End in plays 2:22 and The Pillowman), New York City (where her and Stranger Things’ David Harbour lived, and became the subsequent fuel for the fire), and a riff of their designer home, Allen tells the quasi-autobiographical and self-admitted unreliable narrative of her husband’s antics across blurred lines and a combustible open marriage.
Just like the album, the live show deliciously blends and alters reality, veering between heartbroken matrimonial ingénue and teetering post-divorce valour. If her theatre career began the spiral of her husband’s behaviour, she’s intelligently reclaiming it in playhouse-soaked pop tonight.
Bucking post-COVID concert trends of the 2020’s: a walk-through to a secondary stage, customised interactions in each city, and a nightly setlist shake-up of a song or two, the tour is a creative endeavour — a slanted take on a jukebox musical. West End Girl is played (in order) in its entirety. There’s no hits nor a live band. But that’s precisely the point. It’s theatre. Allen’s singing, flawlessly, live; but it’s just her and us, in the equivalent of a therapist’s office with a chaise longue and our troubled heroine draped in lingerie.
She holds the entire O2 in her hand as the performer of a one-woman show; no bandmates to introduce, nor dancers to pick up the slack. Sans a few drum-n-bass scene changes to hoist a chandelier or move a bed, it’s an evolving set chronicling a messy divorce album onto the storytelling stage. Props are judiciously scattered throughout: lyric-paired sex toys, reams of infidelity-fuelled shopping receipts rolled around Allen’s body, pulling her in and dazzling spinning her out — reflecting the real-life damage from ordeals experienced, and a sneaky vape hidden in a fridge.
Allen’s first chart entry in a hot minute, Pussy Palace, goes down a treat, the crowd unanimously asks ‘and who the fuck is Madeline?’ During Tennis, and the TikTok-friendly dance routine to Nonmonogamummy brings back Allen’s trademark lyrical witticism; it has to be said, though, tender moments during Relapse, Just Enough, and Let You W/In cross over into universally-felt emotions of rejection, failure, and lost trust, and partners + friends lean in, swaying in the heat. Taking a look across her fans, she’s perfectly traversed across the millennials whose nights out she soundtracked in the 00s, through to TikTok-hooked Gen Z with her catalogue going viral in previous years; in just a few days, her debut single Smile turns 20.
The Twitter trolls might have started up their Lily Allen rage campaigns this week, once again, but she needn’t be bothered. Fans, clear as day, are happy to have their idol back, performing, live, and well. She might not be Coldplay or Pink Floyd; but that’s exactly the point. She’s Lily Allen, our West End Girl, and she can indeed fill out an arena. And as the star leaves the stage following a theatre etiquette-approved bow and thanking the audience, as she steps off, she’s finally given her flowers.