Lily Allen is trying to rein herself in from spending all her money after the huge success of West End Girl.
In October the Tennis hitmaker, 40, dropped the album of the year which overnight became her most celebrated since the Londoner exploded onto the scene with Alright, Still in 2006.
In it, she documents the song-by-song the story – said to be a mix of fact and fiction – of her divorce from Stranger Things actor David Harbour in a spectacular and theatrical return for the Smile hitmaker, seven years after her last album.
Two months on and Lily’s success continues to soar, with a performance with Dakota Johnson of West End Girl on Saturday Night Live, which was branded ‘iconic’ by fans but she now says was a ‘mess’ vocally.
Lily has revealed she bought herself a big diamond ring to congratulate herself on her album, but that she is conscious to check herself against her own instincts to shop like a ‘billionaire’.
‘I actually did EMDR therapy yesterday about my spending,’ Lily said in a new episode of her former podcast Miss Me? with best friend Miquita Oliver, which the singer left earlier this year to focus on her own projects.
‘It’s how it’s related to my sense of self-worth and we tried to separate the two, so we will see how that goes,’ she explained of the therapy, which she stresses works for her personally – though she doesn’t understand the science behind it.
‘I try to get rid of [the money] because I don’t think I deserve it,’ Lily said, explaining: ‘It’s a special type of therapy, there’s stimuli that stimulate the left and right side of your brain and try to create new pathways in relation to certain behaviours or traumatic interactions with certain human beings. Anything really.
‘I’ve been doing talk therapy for a long time and I started doing EMDR five months ago, it’s been life-changing. I absolutely love it.’
What is Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EDMR) therapy?
According to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, EDMR is ‘a comprehensive psychotherapy that helps you process and recover from past experiences that are affecting your mental health and wellbeing’.
The association continues: ‘It involves using side to side eye movements combined with talk therapy in a specific and structured format.
‘EMDR helps you process the negative images, emotions, beliefs and body sensations associated with traumatic memories that seem to be stuck. These can contribute to a range of mental health problems.
‘EMDR helps you to see things from a different perspective and relieves the symptoms that you were suffering.’
Describing the therapy, Lily said: ‘You usually start by deciding on which area you will focus on in that session. Then you visualise that experience. You try and think about how painful that event is from one to 10 and you activate the stimuli, which in my case is two vibrating balls in my hands.
‘You identify the feelings in your body and your mind, and do that five or six times and you find the pain level goes down and down.
‘If you’re trying to get rid of a behaviour you do the opposite, you think of the good feeling it brings up in your body and you try to disassociate that good feeling from your sense of self worth.’
Reflecting on her spending habits, Lily said: ‘I have a tiny little bit of success and am convinced I’m a billionaire and have been shopping like an insane person. All day long, shop, shop, shop. Some handbags have been bought. Some jewels have been bought and a car.’
Lily has previously been open about her finances, particularly when she was forced to sell her dream £4.2million Cotswolds mansion in 2016 after being sued by a former tour manager – something which she’s now confessed in the episode is still a sore point today.
What does Lily Allen say about David Harbour in West End Girl?
Lily sings they had an arrangement in their marriage where Harbour could sleep with other women if he could, ‘be discreet and don’t be blatant / it had to be with strangers / there had to be payment,’ but that he broke the trust with a co-worker called ‘Madeline’ – who is actually costume designer Natalie Tippet.
Also claiming she was gaslit and manipulated in their relationship, Lily sings about Harbour’s New York apartment, which she nicknames ‘Pussy Palace’, where she ‘found a shoebox full of handwritten letters /From brokenhearted women wishing you could have been better’.
The Not Fair hitmaker also says she found a bag full of ’sex toys, butt plugs, and lube inside’, while criticising Harbour’s ‘double life’.
Talking about her Saturday Night Live performance, Lily admitted it was ‘terrifying’ – and that showed in her performance.
‘I didn’t look at the internet in the days after because I thought everyone would be horrible about my vocals. But I did look on TikTok, and people actually liked it was a bit of a mess,’ she said.
‘I was singing about some heavy things that have happened in the recent past, and I was in New York which is where I lived for a while. That was quite hard, and having not done it for seven years. And doing it on such a massive platform.’
While Lily is existing on cloud nine at the moment, she still feels imposter syndrome – and has her entire life.
‘The little voice is always there going, “You don’t deserve this, you’re crap. You’re a nepo baby, you don’t have any talent.” It’s hard to drown those voices out sometimes. That’s why I buy so many handbags,’ she quipped.
Lily’s podcast revelations come after she hosted a celebrity-packed party in London nightspot Stringfellows, in which she was pictured kissing Jonah Freud while wearing a sultry festive outfit.
She and Jonah – who is the son of PR boss Matthew Freud, the nephew of celebrated late artist Lucian Freud, and Charlotte Hutton – were pictured getting cosy in snaps published by TMZ.
Meanwhile last week Harbour pulled out of an event for Stranger Things season five – the last episodes of which premiere on Christmas Day – after a bizarre interaction with a fan.
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