It’s October 2025 and everything seems perfectly normal. Little do we know that Lily Allen is about to release a life-changing album. A comeback that will go down in pop music history books, cementing October 24th, 2025 as a day to never forget. Her album West End Girl feels like listening to a diary read out loud over beautifully curated production and carefully selected samples here and there. A project that truly needs to be enjoyed front to back; pressing the shuffle button just won’t be appropriate. This right away raises the question of how the album should be experienced live.
Lily Allen is clearly at a point in her career where she can do whatever works for her and her art. She has been an industry puppet before and is clearly over it. After the experiences in her personal life, it only makes sense that she is now taking full control over her life, including taking the reins in her career. Naturally, this led to the decision of rewriting the books on what a world tour around an album release can be. The singer made a decision that, just like the album itself, will go down in history and be studied in the years to come. West End Girl is played in its full glory, front to back, in a theatre setup.
If you are here for the big hits such as ‘Smile’, ‘The Fear’ and ‘Not Fair’, well… turn around. This is not your ordinary concert where hits from the past and songs from the new album meet in the setlist. This setlist was a no-brainer: we start at the beginning of the album, follow the tracklist to the final song, and that’s it. It must be beautiful to have an album that is so strong in its message and theme that it makes it possible to do a world tour in this way. A way that truly hasn’t been done before. Lily Allen Performs West End Girl should not be perceived as a concert, but rather as a musical or theatre play. Obviously due to its setup, but more so for the storytelling through the music. The fact that this also means we stay within the one-hour mark for the show duration makes it perfect to bring to festival season. Which brings us fast forward to today.
Berlin is in luck this weekend, and we have Lollapalooza to thank for it. The festival did a remarkable job booking the show for this weekend. Among a killer line-up filled with stars such as Zara Larsson, Lorde and Don West, we get the chance to experience the West End Girl show on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the Olympiastadion, right here in Berlin. We feel lucky to be able to witness the show that everyone has been talking about ever since the first tour stop.
Lily Allen enters the stage and leaves no time to waste. The music starts playing, she smiles at us, doesn’t say a word to the crowd, but rather starts singing from the get-go. Unusual, but we live for it. When the music speaks for itself, there is no need to stop it to talk with the audience. The show is painful to watch in the sense that we are here as a crowd cheering her on, applauding after each song, while she is up there reliving some of the most painful times in her life. The show is a gentle reminder of her acting career, as she clearly treats it as a theatre piece. In the instrumental moments, she expresses the pain she went through. She might not say a word to us, but her cheeky, charismatic laughs and smiles in between say it all: she loves being here and is proud to show us her undeniable talent as a performer.
We would love to tell you all about the fun bits and the surprising attributes entering the stage, but we won’t. More so, we urge you to grab any opportunity to go and witness it yourself. This is a show that you simply can’t miss out on. We would go as far as saying you should even see it if you don’t like Lily Allen at all, but are simply a music fanatic. This show will open your eyes to how a world tour can look. The ways it could be if we dare to think outside of the box. We can’t applaud the ‘Pussy Palace’ hitmaker enough for taking the lead in changing the traditions around touring. This is the start of a new era for live music.