On a Saturday night in Boston, British pop singer Lily Allen took the stage six minutes after 9 p.m. in a pink tweed suit straight out of “Mad Men.” There was no band to support her and, after she delivered the 14th song of her set, no encores.
Allen played her latest album, “West End Girl,” from start to finish and in the order the songs appear, and the audience loved it, cheering for a solid minute. She smiled, waved, accepted a bouquet and we were done. At 9:57 p.m.
Did anyone mind that they’d paid anywhere from $150 to $250 for a ticket?
Not that I noticed.
“I feel like she has created this experience with this story she’s telling,” said Stephanie Fox, 61, who was sitting in front of me. “It’s of the time, of the moment, it’s really personal and I feel like this is a support group for Lily Allen. Like, he was an asshole and you deserve better.”
Fox was referring to David Harbour, the “Stranger Things” actor whose marriage to Allen dissolved amid rumors of infidelity. And “West End Girl,” Allen’s fifth album, autopsies the entire debacle. With her references to sex toys, and dramatic readings of texts from her ex’s alleged paramour, Allen makes classic breakup records like Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear” and Adele’s “21” feel lighter than a Bay City Rollers single. Which has been the point of Allen’s first tour in years. (On Sunday, she plays the Warner Theatre in D.C.)
But she’s not the only artist trying to keep it short and sweet.
A few months earlier, I went to see Audrey Hobert, the NYU graduate and Gracie Abrams pal touring behind her debut album “Who’s the Clown?” It was a great show, full of Hobert’s literate pop, dramatic costume changes (a giant trench coat on a ladder was a nice touch) and the artist’s jagged, geeky dancing. But then the lights went up, and the crowd began to file out. I turned to my daughter.
“Is she coming back?” I asked.
“No,” she told me. “She played all her songs.”
In fact, Lila pointed out, Hobert even played one of them, “Sue Me,” twice.
I asked one of my younger colleagues about this the next day and he informed me that he’d seen Geese’s Cameron Winter in New York and that show couldn’t have gone more than an hour. And it was excellent.
I have been to maybe 100 concerts in my life and I couldn’t think of a single one that was that short, never mind three within a few months. And indeed, the brevity of Allen’s concerts has drawn some backlash online.
But then I thought long and hard about my personal experiences at the concerts where I arguably derived the most dollar-for-dollar musical enjoyment:
The legend Paul McCartney delivered an almost three-hour show that left me stuck in the Meadowlands parking lot at 1 a.m.
I had to scramble out of a dazzling Phish concert at the Sphere in Las Vegas, before it ended, to catch my flight home.
I couldn’t wait to see last year’s Outlaw Country show with my wife, since two of her favorites — Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson — were headlining. But ultimately, she had a work assignment that made it impossible for her to commit to six hours in an amphitheater seat. So I went without her.
Maybe Lily Allen has a point?
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Because the beauty of the less-than-an-hour show is that it ends before 10. You can get a drink or even dinner or hustle home in time to watch James Austin Johnson do his Donald Trump in the SNL cold open. Or just go to bed early.
“I saw Taylor Swift do the Eras Tour and it’s hours long and that made sense for her,” Lindsay Candito, 26, told me in the lobby of Boston’s Orpheum Theatre. “This [Lily Allen] album is just so specific as to what it is. I’m excited to see the artistic flair she puts on each song, to see how she makes each song flow into each other. She’s offering something different — and I’m paying to see that.”
It was a special show, reminding me more of a play than a pop concert. Allen delivered a performance as the scorned wife that was both heartbreaking (the contemplation of pills and drink) and defiant (one performance delivered in lingerie and heels). At one point, she’s wrapped in the “revenge dress,” a length of green fabric printed with what’s said to be images of receipts she found documenting what her ex spent on other women.
Even without a band, I found some of the songs coming alive in a way they didn’t on the record. “Dallas Major,” with its thumping bass and projections of dancers reminiscent of an old Deee-Lite video, was a particular highlight.
Not everyone felt the same.
A friend texted later that she felt ripped off, disappointed that Allen’s earlier catalogue was handed off to the cello trio that opened the show. And then there was Richard Glasson, a Brit who lives in New York, whom I met in the lobby before the show.
Glasson had come with his wife on a weekend away from the kid. They didn’t know what to expect having never seen Allen before.
After the show, he emailed me to say they had left 20 minutes in.
While I’d been mesmerized, he found it to be “more like karaoke than a gig” and complained that she “just went through the motions and we might as well have been listening to the album at home.”
But there was an upside.
“We had a lovely meal instead,” he said. “Ruka at the Godfrey Hotel is great!”
