While everyone was sleeping on Lily Allen’s fourth album, No Shame, one of the many songs that seemed to be forgotten too quickly was its lead single, “Trigger Bang” featuring Giggs. Well, technically its only single, though “Lost My Mind” did get an accompanying video as well. Albeit one that isn’t quite as “elaborate” in concept as “Trigger Bang,” which features far more characters and location changes (though both videos are directed by Myles Whittingham). As it should, considering it’s an especially personal track from the album.
Not that all of Allen’s music isn’t deeply personal (as West End Girl continued to prove), it’s just that “Trigger Bang” was the first time Allen broached the subject of her addiction so candidly, and with such overt intentions to change the ways that had landed her in the press almost as much as Amy Winehouse throughout the 2000s. Indeed, the year after No Shame was released in 2018 marked the official beginning of Allen’s “sober journey.”
A journey that was tested to its limits as her marriage to David Harbour began to break down, as told in a kind of chronological order throughout West End Girl. Which is why the placement of “Relapse” on the album comes at such a strategic moment. Namely, following Album Allen’s (a way to refer to her that helps distinguish “In Real Life Allen” from the more “fictionalized” details present on the record) revelation that her husband has been cheating on her with a woman she never preapproved, as per the terms of their “arrangement.” One that her husband foisted upon her in the first place during track one, “West End Girl.” And while Album Allen goes along with it as best as she can, by the time track five, “Madeline,” rolls around, she’s brimming with rage (“Lie to me, babe, and I’ll end you”) that gives way to a spiraling kind of sadness by track six, “Relapse.”
As a natural companion piece to “Trigger Bang,” “Relapse” finds Allen exploring the various “what ifs” of essentially “hanging with the cool gang” again, were she to rely on the comfort of a drink or four or more. Especially since it seems to have been her only potential source of consolation during that emotional nadir, as evidenced from the very first lines, “The ground is gone beneath me/You pulled the safety net.” A safety net that was already in peril as a result of Allen upending her life to move herself and her kids from London to New York for that “brownstone” and “good mortgage” (having come a long way from the scene she painted in 2006’s “Everything’s Just Wonderful” with the lyrics, “I wanna get a flat, I know I can’t afford it/It’s just the bureaucrats who won’t give me a mortgage”).
Thus, her lone safety net was her husband, a gamble she didn’t feel paid off when she confirms, “I moved across an ocean/From my family, from my friends/The foundation is shattered/You’ve made such a fucking mess.” And when someone in recovery feels out of control and without their foundation/safety net, of course they’re going to be tempted by past destructive behaviors that once felt so good and so right to them whenever they wanted to numb any sense of pain. So it is that Allen gets straight to the heart of the matter with the chorus, “I need a drink/I need a Valium/You pushed me too far, and I just need to be numb.”
The subject of her go-to coping mechanism—numbing herself with drugs—also comes up in a similar way on “Trigger Bang” when she sings, “Anything went, I was famous/I would wake up next to strangers/Everyone knows what cocaine does/Numbing the pain when the shame comes, hey.” Thereby creating a vicious cycle during the height of her addiction in which she would keep piling on the alcohol and cocaine (or sometimes, unbeknownst to her, ketamine [see: the 2008 Glamour Awards]) before getting fully sober from the night before. All in a bid to stave off the darkness and, yes, the shame. Which is part of why it was especially empowering for Allen, during that period, to title her record No Shame. Because, for the first time, she seemed to genuinely mean it.
Part of arriving at the conclusion that she needed to purge herself of this “habit” (i.e., way of life) was acknowledging, “And it fuels my addictions/Hanging out in this whirlwind.” Little did she know, trying to live a “simple” life in Carroll Gardens would turn out to be quite the whirlwind of its own. And also an environment where she would up having to make the same ultimatum to her husband that she does to everyone else in “Trigger Bang”: “If you cool my ambitions, I’m gonna cut you out.” And oh, how Harbour did try to cool her ambitions, if a certain red-carpet interview at the Olivier Awards is any indication—not to mention their Open Door segment for Architectural Digest). So, in the end, Allen found the strength to carry on. Miraculously enough, without any of the usual numbing agents of her past that she might have turned to in order to get through something so harrowing. Though it wasn’t for a lack of desire.
In fact, several times on her Miss Me? podcast with Miquita Oliver (which Allen jumped ship on soon before West End Girl was to come out), she mentioned the temptation she felt to drink again, but always carefully considered that it would never be worth the great loss that would come as a result. Namely, of her kids’ trust and, potentially, her own livelihood (therefore, her children’s). For drunken antics hardly “sell” the way they did between 2006 and about 2015. So it is that Allen declares on “Relapse,” “If I relapse/I know I stand to lose it all/Can you bring me back/When I’m climbing up the walls?” (Incidentally, wall/spatial metaphors are among her favorite for songwriting, as she also mentions a version of wall climbing on “Lost My Mind” when she sings, “You’re on the ceiling/I’m down here on the floor”—and in the video she literally is climbing up walls.)
As she repeats, “I-I need a drink” toward the end, she’s unafraid to clarify, “More than one.” And yet, perhaps remembering the girl who was fresh from her bingeing days on “Trigger Bang,” Allen knows that the fantasy of drinking again is far preferable to the reality of the hell she would sink into as a consequence of a mere “instant” of weakness. But such is the alcoholic’s plight: “One drink is too many and a thousand is never enough.” Or, to put it the Pringles way: “Once you pop, you can’t stop.” So best not to “pop” a.k.a. relapse at all. Of course, easier said than done. Particularly when you’ve been “pushed too far.”
