It might have been her vision, but Lily Allen’s West End Girl - the hit ‘autofiction’ album that documents the ‘opening’ of a marriage and its subsequent breakdown in bruising detail - was very much a team effort.
Confirmation of this can be found in the credits: there are no fewer than 10 different producers (including Allen herself) and a lengthy list of songwriting collaborators.
Now Violet Skies (AKA Hannah Berney), a songwriter from Wales who contributed to multiple tracks on West End Girl including viral single Madeline, has been speaking about her experience of working on the record, which was written and recorded in Los Angeles over a 10-day period last year.
In an interview with Grazia, Skies describes being given just a couple of weeks notice to get to the LA home of Blue May, Allen’s long-time collaborator, and says that the star had a strong outline of the album right from the outset.
“Lily arrived with the song titles, which is really very unusual,” she explains. “She would come in and say, ‘Right, I want to write a song called Dallas Major,’ and we’re like, ‘OK, let’s have some backstory.’”
Allen certainly had plenty of material to draw on, but given how personal the subject matter was, Skies had to approach the sessions with a degree of sensitivity.
“These are very real feelings Lily had,” she says. “It was very intense, some 12-hour days. The day we wrote Relapse was a night-time studio session at Blue’s house, but earlier we’d been writing Madeline, so it was very heavy, and you have to really talk through the process enough to work out what she wants to say.
“On days like that, it was like playing tennis with Lily. I’d throw some melodies or lyrics, and she’d throw some back. Sometimes she would hand me a whole paragraph of thoughts and then we’d organise them.”
This wasn’t a group of people crowded round a laptop, though - Skies says that the studio was full of people playing guitars, piano and drums.
“It felt like days I had as a teenager in a band, writing live in the room,” she remembers. “That’s not normal these days. Many songwriting sessions have less and less real instruments, it’s just a computer.”
Speaking to BBC News, Skies stressed how invested Allen was in the project, and how open she was to collaboration. She also believes that, given the story it tells, West End Girl deserves to be consumed whole rather piecemeal.
"Making this album with friends I've known for years is a massive part of the reason I'm so proud of these songs,” she says. “Please listen top to bottom."
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