Two break-up albums, unalike in dignity

Lily Allen and Cate LeBon handle things differently

Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’ and Cate Le Bon’s ‘Michaelangelo Dying’, both albums released in 2025

It’s a strange thing to know about the actor David Harbour’s preference in condoms, but there we are; I know because Lily Allen told me. Indeed, on her album ‘West End Girl’ Lily Allen told me pretty much everything that went down in her marriage to Harbour (he wanted to fuck other people, she said he could, he did, turns out she didn’t want him to fuck other people after all). As ever, only the details are really compelling; the bags of Trojans, the message from one of her husband’s lovers signing off ‘Love and light’, the real-life ‘bad luck flowers’ from Harbour wishing Allen a theatrical failure. The tunes are catchy but also all within the same mid-tempo pop groove, the vocal range chirpy but narrow.

Around the same time last year, another break-up album Cate Le Bon’s ‘Michaelangelo Dying’, attracted acclaim and interest, tho not Allen’s level of sales or streams. Quand même, it’s a spectacular record; the Welsh art-pop singer has long been good, but on this record she really puts it together as a suite of songs – a coherent one too, with its own musical languages of saxophones and synthesizers. A bit Cocteau Twins circa ‘Heaven and Las Vegas’, a bit Eurythmics around ‘Must be Talking to An Angel’, and then some Psychedelic Furs and Kate Bush in there too. I say it’s a break-up album but that’s all communicated in half-glimpses and implications. You get the sense that what CLB is really interested in is the music, that her words will always be subservient to the sound, and that’s because the emotion of a song will always put you more into what she wants to share than just saying it.

Nonetheless, lyrics like ‘My body is a river/A river running dry/And I’m sick all the time/Until he comes to life’ seem pretty explicitly sexual and post (or mid) break up horny to me. Likewise, a snatched lyric such as ‘I give up the empire’ on ‘Mother of Riches’, my fave track on the record, seems to evoke some sense of demotion via romantic loss, some terror of losing the lovers’ world. In a sense it’s the precise opposite of the Lily Allen, in that it’s the generalities which are interesting, the tone and feel of the whole thing, to the listener, the implied distress behind the music.

The contrast between these two albums, Le Bon’s obliqueness against Allen’s pure confessional, got me thinking about the use of ‘raw’ as a compliment for a work of art and perhaps particularly a musical work of art. That it’s now seen as a virtue for the musician to have very little between themselves and their audience while they give their unfiltered version of events.

And yet outside of the context of confessional art, raw isn’t considered much of a compliment at all; aside from sushi and those fad diets, no-one would think of praising food for being raw; it just means nothing has been done to it yet, apart from rudimentary chopping up. I’ve read several reviews praising Allen’s ability to present events in the order they happened without editing, life as is, and couldn’t help thinking: What you’re describing is a diary. Certainly, Allen does not seem to show Cate’s care at the music and some of the musical flourishes on the album, such as the skanking on ‘Nonmonogamummy’ by dancehall star Stirling Moss, are borderline embarrassing. As is that song title.

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There are two aspects of all this cultural oversharing I find uncomfortable. One is this idea that the confessional should automatically demand respect, that all the artist needs to do is to say what happened to them and they should be applauded for something like their ‘bravery’. That the personal is inherently worthy of respect, and the more personal the better; the idea behind current hit weepy ‘Hamnet’ (which to be clear I’ve yet to see) seems to me a very modern manifestation of this, that Shakespeare can only have written ‘Hamlet’ from direct personal grief rather than just wanting to explore a weird story of a Prince - a story based on existing sources, in actual fact, that long predate any personal tragedy which befell its author. Hamlet may sound like Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, but it also just means ‘Ameth’ (mad) in old Norse. In addition, Hamnet was just the name of Shakespeare’s son’s godfather.

But that was years ago and the past inevitably invites us to fantasise about it; the events Allen describes are very recent. She is, in the modern parlance, spilling the tea. It would be easy to describe this self-revelation as feminine-coded, the idea that women need to communicate, and yet confessional writing arguably dates back above all to the epically neurotic Robert Lowell and his ‘Life Studies’. I like Lowell, but not everything being Lowell. I object to the idea that extreme (or even fairly boilerplate) experience in itself is to be afforded respect like this just in face of it being recounted, even compellingly; to extend the cooking comparison, it’s a bit like going round to a friend’s house and seeing chopped vegetables, a pack of rice and bubbling pan of vegetable oil and, while agreeing everything you need is there, asking, ‘Are you actually going to make a meal?’

Even in 2026 there remains a tiny part of me which finds spilling the most intimate parts of my experience undignified. Now, to a large extent I’m one to talk, as editions of my newsletter have been frankly confessional, and they have often been the most successful ones too. Where I'd make a distinction is that many of the events I write about happened a long time ago, meaning my reaction to them could scarcely be described as ‘raw and unfiltered’. And I haven’t written at all about the great upheaval of my last few years, the end of my marriage. It all has to be left time to work through the system, mentally and physically, rather than being ‘spilled’ to my readers before even half the work of mourning is done. When I do write about these things, it might indeed even not be directly, but transformed into something new via fiction, perhaps in a way which is only much later evident to me.

At a certain point, isn’t autofiction just gossip? Or at least might be a product of someone not having the time, energy or creativity to make something up. A cultural dead-end from a culture that prefers the straitjackets of specific identity to the billowing cloaks of dreams. Many people seem to have lost the idea that the imagination is more interesting than reality, that the imagination really can make something new of experience.

In November, I saw Cate LeBon live in Brussels. She was brilliant and played pretty much the whole of ‘Michaelangelo Dying’. She was dressed in a pink rubber suit and was evidently leaning heavily into the whole David Bowie in Ashes to Ashes look. It’s pretty hard to know what to think about a figure like Welsh Space Pierrot in the context of a break-up. It seemed evident tho that LeBon was not in thrall to her heartbreak, was making something of it, and that that making was the way to open up the next part of her life. It wasn’t just gossiping about the regular and awful stages of a split; it was building something new on its bones. It just felt like Cate was further along in the stages of grief than Allen’s diaristic album. For if you’re still itemising your ex’s contraceptive brands, still trapped in exactly who did what to who, it seems to me that you’re far from still moving on; in a way, a hatchet job is always a sign that its target means something to you.

What Cate had done made something new possible. She had created a private language and gathered a public around it. She’d gone beyond just reading her grievances over a beat to what Wallace Stevens called ‘A new knowledge of reality’; she had made something for us. It was bigger than a diary, bigger than a break-up, and for me well beyond any smug notion of ‘raw’. ‘Raw’ is your diary, and there’s a reason diaries are the last things to get published; they’re invariably your first draft. They’re what happen to us before we can happen to it.

Cate LeBon at Botanique, Brussels, 09.11.2025