Lily Allen Takes to SNL With ‘Sleepwalking’ and ‘Madeline’

Lily Allen stepped back onto the Saturday Night Live stage for the first time in almost 19 years, delivering two songs from her latest pop release, West End Girl.

A former SNL musical guest in early 2007, Allen kicked off the night with “Sleepwalking,” the third track on the album’s running order.

Inspired by the breakdown of her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour, West End Girl sees the British singer songwriter, as Rolling Stone’s Maura Johnston noted in a favorable review, “taking a brutal inventory of the scars she amassed while her marriage was falling apart.”

Allen has shared that the upheaval in her personal life ultimately helped break her out of a prolonged period of writer’s block.

“I thought I didn’t have any good songs left,” Allen, 40, told The Times following the album’s release in October. “My writing had been really bad and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, ‘Oh, here she is.’”

Later in the episode, Allen returned to the stage alongside actress Dakota Johnson for “Madeline,” with Johnson portraying the woman involved in her husband’s affair.

West End Girl, which follows Allen’s 2018 album No Shame, has since been named one of Rolling Stone’s 100 best albums of the year. The publication praised the record, writing, “Here we find Allen, nearly 20 years after her debut, Alright, Still, delivering her most ruthless music yet, an odyssey of betrayal and heartbreak, a work where musical storytelling is laid out in its barest and sharpest form.”

Allen is set to take West End Girl on the road this April, performing the album in full across a nine city North American tour.