For some pop stars, a turn on the West End stage is a challenge – physically, vocally, emotionally – and often ends up as a black spot on an otherwise long and fruitful career. But for Rebecca Lucy Taylor, playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret was a “piece of piss compared to being Self Esteem”. She did seven shows a week at the Kit Kat Club in Soho, till March this year. All she had to do was clock in, she says: “Honestly, I loved having all day off. I’d turn up with no bra on and still get to do my job. It was like a holiday”.
We meet in a London Fields café three years after the release of her phenomenally successful second album as Self Esteem, Prioritise Pleasure. Before she took on that stage name, Taylor was best known as one half of the Sheffield indie duo Slow Club. The hype around the record was so great that Taylor went numb and has forgotten much of that time, she says. Today, her PR suggested she might be more comfortable staying in the company office over the road for this interview. “I said, people won’t recognise me! I’m not famous!” Now she must represent herself anew in a world that allows female pop stars to last as long as fruit flies. “I made the last album before ‘Brat’ existed,” she sighs, in reference to the album that brought Charli XCX into the mainstream, “or Sabrina f***ing Carpenter or Chappell Roan. When Prioritise Pleasure came out there was still not much going on, female-wise, and now it’s everywhere – they’re a thing now, women! It’s supremacy!”
She is soon to be moving in round the corner, where she has bought her first flat. She will live there alone: her dislike of social engagements, and the universal way in which she articulates anxieties about them, were first heard on the song that launched her solo career, 2021’s “I Do This All the Time”: (“This sun is making me feel like I’m missing out on something/But if I went to your barbecue, I’d feel uncomfortable and not be sure what to say anyway.”) This way of talking – released on the ears of a world dragging itself out of the big winter lockdown – made Taylor sound like no other: deadpan, mundane, but moving, as her thoughts drifted from defensive-tough to lost and introspective. “Sometimes I think: ‘Do I just hate everything?’” she suggests, with glee. “But then, I’m alone in my house, going, “Oh, but I don’t like this, either…” She was recently at a Vogue party, and it went fine – but for the fact she was sat between two people who she suspected didn’t know who she was, so they didn’t ask, so she couldn’t tell them, and it was all a bit awkward…
Self Esteem is something of a fashion icon, one of the first of many female artists now dabbling in drag. “Sending up the absurdity of femininity makes you free,” she reckons. “It’s anti-Kim Kardashianism, drag is, to women, I think.”
The name of her new album, out next April, is still a secret, but she’s gone for a theme that means a lot to her – an attitude she returns to time and again in our interview, and which she characterises as: huh? She has no carefully prepared line about what she’s promoting. There is a new track about drinking culture, looking with doubt on the new puritanism of her sober millennial contemporaries. “There’s clearly something bubbling away under the surface that I’m not eloquent enough to talk about,” she says. “But something has happened – I don’t know if it’s age or what, but my hunger and anger and drive, they’re all there, but they’re hurting me now, whereas it used to just feel like very good petrol. I’m still as angry, and I’m wanting revenge, and I still want to prove my point – but I’m just slightly more… huh?”
She decided on her name quite randomly, years ago – “There are no good band names,” she said – but it’s really the only name she could have. Self Esteem wears her work as a duty, to articulate and explore the pervasive ideas women have to live with. “I want to change how people feel. It’s like a meditation, I think: subliminal messaging of, ‘You’ll be all right,’ or ‘You’re fine as you are.’” Now, she finds herself embodying both the inner self that is happy to get older and better at living, and the sexist judgments of the outer world.
“I’m 38 in October, which doesn’t seem like a big deal, but doing an album, putting it out, even styling it, I’ve suddenly felt ridiculous. That is my own misogyny, and my own bullshit that I’ve fought, and will fight. But there’s something about saying, ‘This is the new me, and it’s my new style and it’s my new album’ – the older I’m getting, the more mortifying that is, for some reason. I watched the Blur documentary [To the End] recently and they’re all in their fifties. No one gives a shit; they still look cool, they’re all just getting pissed up, and I thought: ‘If these were 50-year-old women getting pissed up, you’d all be hysterical about that, being caught on camera.’”
She came of age in the insalubrious world of the Libertines and the Strokes, and released five albums with Charles Watson as Slow Club between 2009 and 2016. The popular Instagram account Indie Sleaze (tagline: “Documenting the decadence of the mid-late aughts”) has been helpful in showing her that others, too, sat miserable in the Amersham Arms in New Cross, London, trying to follow boys in bands. She is still haunted by the alienation of being one of the only girls in indie. “My heart would ache with not fitting in.”
Taylor has a fan base of “girlies” who all know one another, but they don’t make her life miserable. They don’t tell her what to release, and what not to release: “They wouldn’t dare. A record label will say, ‘OK, you need to be in the WhatsApp group too,’ – that’s how these huge artists are doing it now,” she explains. “But most of it feels unethical to me. Fame is a game you’re never going to win. It’s a trap, waking up every day feeling like you’ve not quite made it.”
On her new record, she has taken her experimental, gospel-infused sound and worked it up to something bigger with a full orchestra. Her background in music was always eclectic: her father plays prog synth like John Lord from Deep Purple, his pedals thudding the floorboards of the family’s Sheffield home.
Her parents were aghast when the story got about that she was the daughter of a steelworker: “He worked at a steel company, but he was never wiping his brow in the furnace,” she says. “It’s not as Brassed Off as it sounds. My mum said, ‘He was a health and safety officer, thank you very much!’ She wants people to know we weren’t poor. I said, ‘Mum, you’ve got to understand how important it is that someone like me is thriving in an industry where everyone I know has got extremely rich parents.’”
Her determination not to “sell out” musically, she says, comes from a desire to impress her dad. She admires no one more than Peter Gabriel, whose experimental vision was set at a young age: she’s been watching footage of his Secret World tour repeatedly. “I basically want to be the female Peter Gabriel. I love him so much and he still hasn’t called.”
“People really don’t want women to be successful for long,” she sighs. “You could make a Rumours-level amazing album and they’d go, ‘It’s a four, sorry.’ But anything trendy is fleeting – it’s a beautiful thing to remember. And every time I’m nervous about not looking ‘brat’, I think: everything’s ridiculous eventually. Nothing’s cool, other than being a unifying voice. Saying what you mean and being honest and friendly and helping other people feel not alone.”
Cabaret’s director, Rebecca Frecknall, recalls Taylor’s “rawness, humour and rock star energy”. I ask Taylor how she approached the role of Sally Bowles, and she said she wanted to play the 19-year-old ex-showgirl as “hot because she’s not. She’s smart, she ducks into the performative sexiness or wildness, but mostly – this is how I feel, as well – she is just sat about being disgusting and real. She drinks too much, smokes too much, wants to live fast – also wants someone to just love her and have a f***ing baby, but feels like she can’t, because that’s letting down what she represents. And if that ain’t me, then f***ing hell!” She booms with laughter.
For Self Esteem, rejecting the idea of monogamy and babies always gave her a sense of superiority. Admitting that she might want those things feels “like being a scab on the picket line”.
“I did this all the time in my twenties,” she says. “‘Loser if you’ve got a boyfriend, loser if you want to get married,’ – it was part of the ammunition to get to where I’ve got to. What happens if I did want those things now? I’ve been maturing my disgust at societal norms. We aren’t linear – we might think one thing, we might think another. The new album is a thawing of my vitriol, while also trying to accept the choices that I’ve made.”
Finally, she has put the huh into words.
[See also: The end of Generation Rock]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The crisis candidate