Working with designer Anna Fleischle, the singer created a stage that would make the audience feel “like a voyeur”
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... To bring her vision to life, Allen turned to her friend and longtime collaborator Anna Fleischle, a renowned London-based set designer and creative director who has spent her entire career building worlds for the stage, including plays Allen has starred in. “It’s quite rare in pop music to get people to take what you’re doing as an artist seriously, rather than seeing it as a commercial endeavor,” Allen says. “I trusted her immediately.”
After receiving the album via text from Allen while at the hairdresser, Fleischle immediately began dreaming up what the physical world for West End Girl could possibly look like. “I was so moved by it,” Fleischle says. “It was a mix of being blown away by the music and the lyrics, but I was also very moved as a friend.” She listened to it track by track and then she sat down and wrote Allen a long text in return—and the partnership began. “It was very organic,” Fleischle says. She put together a mood board of images that came to mind while listening. It was less about aesthetics and more about sensation, but happened to include many design details of Allen’s former home.
“I was recognizing things that I had just recently left behind,” Allen says. “It was a bit sad. I wasn’t really expecting to be sort of hit over the head with it so much.” Many of the items for the set were quite literally plucked from her residence ahead of her Saturday Night Live performance at the end of last year. “My house in New York was literally empty, so we were either gonna have to rent a bunch of stuff or we could just go to my house in Brooklyn and take it,” she says.
The West End Girl tour opens with a bright spotlight on Allen, clad in Valentino, in front of a teal-hued curtain. It’s a gilded and glam grand entrance, entirely by design. “It starts very performative, in front of a curtain, and the star steps out. And then we go inside, and it all still looks glamorous, but it’s starting to get messy,” Fleischle says. From there, the ornamentation strips back, room by room, evolving with the narrative of the album. During the song “Relapse,” a hand reaches out from underneath the bed, as Allen frantically looks for pills in the bedside drawer. Fleischle describes it as “feeling so pulled apart that you’re not even quite sure if your hand is your hand. You’re really seeing parts of yourself, but aren’t emotionally connected. I can see it, but I don’t feel it inside.” Fleischle calls the set design for “4Chan Stan,” where Allen gets swept up in an oversized receipt representing the purchases she unearthed, a visual version of scrolling. “She finds one bit of evidence, and she pulls more, and it’s more, and she’s getting taken. You start with one thing and you just keep going,” she says.
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