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One of David Harbour’s former partners is seemingly offering her support to Lily Allen after the release of the pop star’s new breakup album, West End Girl.
“West End Girl 24.10.25,” Allen recently captioned a series of promotional images onto her Instagram.
Alison Sudol, who dated 50-year-old Harbour before his marriage to 40-year-old Allen, celebrated the record in the comments section.
“🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥,” Sudol, 40, replied to Allen’s upload.
Harbour and Sudol were first romantically linked in January 2018.
“I’m sitting here and I’m thinking to myself, wow, this human being that I am on this crazy journey with is pretty unbelievable,” Sudol gushed via Instagram the next month of celebrating Valentine’s Day with Harbour. “What a generous, large-hearted, roaring wonder of a person I get to walk around and do stuff with. Like eat food and read books out loud and watch our dog sleep. And isn’t that great. What an ignited soul, what a fire-spirit. What a brilliant artist. What a caring, deep, intuitive individual, who has changed my life completely and utterly. What a lucky woman I am.”
Us Weekly exclusively confirmed one year later, in August 2019, that Harbour and Sudol had called it quits “around a month ago.”
Harbour eventually moved on with Allen, and the pair said “I do” in Las Vegas the following year. The Stranger Things star and Allen separated in 2024, which inspired Allen’s West End Girl.
“Intimacy is inherently messy. 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,” Allen told The Times of London in a Saturday, October 25, profile of her lyrical inspiration. “Dating apps make people disposable and that leads to the idea that if you are not happy, there’s so much more to choose from right in your pocket.”
Since the album dropped on Friday, October 24, fans have speculated that Allen called out Harbour for alleging being unfaithful during their marriage. (Harbour has not addressed the claims. Us Weekly reached out for comment.)
“So I read your text, and now I regret it / I can’t get my head round how you’ve been playing tennis,” Allen sings in the “Tennis” chorus. “If it was just sex, I wouldn’t be jealous / You won’t play with me and who’s Madeline?”
In a follow-up song named after Madeline, Allen sings about confronting the woman about the alleged affair.
“I know none of this is your fault / Messaging you feels kind of assaultive,” she sings. “Saw your text, that’s how I found out / Tell me the truth and his motives.”
In her Times profile, Allen revealed that Madeline is “a fictional character” and a construct of several other real people.
“I just feel we are living in really interesting times — in terms of how we define intimacy and monogamy, people being disposable or not,” she told the outlet. “The way we are being intimate with each other is changing as humans. Lots of young women are not finding the idea of marriage or even a long-term relationship that attractive any more.”
Allen continued, “I don’t know [that] it’s necessarily bad. Lots of people from my parents’ generation stayed together forever and were miserable. You didn’t have endless choice so you may have worked at something harder. But now you don’t have to.”
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Harbour previously expressed his intentions to remain quiet about his divorce from Allen, telling GQ in April, “I’m protective of the people and the reality of my life. There’s no use in that form of engaging [with rumors] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole.”
As for Allen, she was previously married to Sam Cooper, with whom she shares two daughters, from 2011 to 2018.
West End Girl is out now.
English (US) ·