Rebecca Lucy Taylor on following 'Prioritise Pleasure''s pop success and crafting Self Esteem's third chapter, 'A Complicated Woman' • Cover Feature • DIY Magazine

Of all the topics you might expect your traditional popstar to land on while on the promo circuit for one of the year’s most anticipated albums, animated equine Netflix protagonist BoJack Horseman would probably not be top of the list. A tragicomic show following a jaded, floundering celebrity trying to claw his way to relevance while constantly falling into depression, addiction and general self-destruction, BoJack is unlikely to be making an appearance in Beyoncé’s press quotes any time soon. And yet… “I relate to that horse more than any character in media,” sighs Rebecca Lucy Taylor, breaking into a signature raucous chuckle and taking a sip of her 0% Guinness.

For the musician, otherwise known – of course – as Self Esteem, the tumultuous route to her current celebrated standing has been well-documented: a long and personally challenging stint in the indie trenches as part of cult duo Slow Club, followed by several years of graft and steely perseverance under her current solo moniker that, for a good while, looked as though it might be headed in the same direction in terms of above-ground capital. Then, however, came game-changing single ‘I Do This All The Time’ and the subsequent phenomenon of 2021 second album ‘Prioritise Pleasure’. Through a combination of superlative songwriting and an unwitting bullseye into a culture beginning to universally wake up and smell the bullshit, Self Esteem found herself the poster woman for a generation of thirty-somethings desperately seeking an alternative to the messaging they’d always been fed.

Suddenly, Taylor was on the telly, on magazine covers, at the top of a slew of end of year lists. ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ finished the year nominated for both a BRIT and the Mercury Prize, while Taylor soon landed the leading role of Sally Bowles in the celebrated West End production of Cabaret. After years of half-jokingly-with-a-large-undercurrent-of-truth mocking her own underdog narrative, the tables had begun to turn. “It feels very, very… better,” she laughs, “to know I can put something out and someone will give a fuck. Straight away I’m on the cover, and that’s lovely. Will I be playlisted? More likely than ever. But I still didn’t WIN any of the big awards; I still don’t feel ‘rated’. So I have to be clear and cool and fine in what I’m doing and the rest is a bonus.”

Success for Self Esteem, it seems, has been just as much of a mental mindfuck as persistently going under the radar was. ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ was made as a sort of last hurrah to the idea of being a full-time musician (“I was looking at retraining to be a keep fit teacher. I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore’”), but getting everything she’d always dreamed of wasn’t quite the great unburdening she’d hoped for either. “It’s been horrible. I was burnt out and really not well after ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ at all, and I’m still processing it all; I feel like I wasn’t there for half of it,” she explains. “I wasn’t looking after myself and really got in a tangle with boozing again. I was binge eating, which is the first time that’s happened to me.”

And so, returning now with Album Three – the first time, it’s worth noting, in a nearly 20-year career that Taylor has been signed to a major label with the music world’s eyes truly awaiting her next move – the narrative is not just one of ‘girl done good’, as if it ever could be. Instead, Self Esteem’s third act is one of reassessing those priorities, of finding pleasure in things previously lost. It’s the narrative of ‘A Complicated Woman’.

“ I’m kind of trying to sell ‘OK’. Which isn’t what Polydor Records wants me to sell…”

When we sit down with Taylor today, she’s thinking about something that, four years back in this same scenario, would have seemed a highly unlikely topic of conversation: having a baby. She’s on the 0% because she’s currently midway through trying to freeze her eggs – a “horrendous” process of twice-daily hormone injections that she’s trying to fit in before life becomes completely hectic once again. “The dog won’t leave me alone so that’s lovely, but the rest of it’s shit,” she summarises. As with a lot of things in the past few years, the decision reflects something of a smudging of the hard lines she’d previously drawn in her thinking; it’s not that Self Esteem is suddenly flying the flag for heteronormative two-point-four children families – far from it – but she’s starting to at least allow certain ideas in.

“I still staunchly feel like if you don’t have a fucking baby you’re fine, and I still might not and I won’t care. But I’m shocked at biology and how I feel,” she says. “I’m eating a lot of humble pie.” Much as the internet memes will have you believe, the trajectory from ‘00s asymmetric-fringed indie sleazer to mid-thirties wild swimming lover of a cold plunge is something that the musician finds horribly relatable. “As much as I kick back at the societal norms of it all, I have been every single thing you think I’d be and now I am a bit of that,” she laughs. “I’ve got candles coming out of my ears; I’ve got Aesop everywhere – and that was a goal! But I’m kind of trying to sell ‘OK’. Which isn’t what Polydor Records wants me to sell…” Another hoot of laughter. “But it’s the answer for me, at the moment. I wanted – wanted, wanted, wanted – this version of a life that felt like I was an adult and I was thriving, but actually what I want is very little.”

This dialling back came as a perhaps surprising result of ‘Prioritise Pleasure’’s success. Where that record repeatedly traded in ideas of hunger and impatience (both ‘I Do This All The Time’ and ‘Fucking Wizardry’’s lyrics put the terms front and centre), the results soon left Taylor completely spent. “It was this weird exchange of longing being replaced with it happening, but I was more unhappy than ever,” she says. “I just couldn’t think. I hated doing it. A big opportunity would come in and I’d be like, ‘NO!’ I just didn’t want to be perceived anymore, it was so weird. So in my untangling of all that – it’s fucking basic but I was like, well why do I do all of this in the first place?”

The answer comes quickly and brilliantly in the form of newly-released lead single ‘Focus Is Power’ and its nostalgic, no frills video set in a community hall. Singing in a circle with her touring band mates and a gospel choir, the set up is meant to hark back to her formative years spent in dance classes at Rotherham’s Monksbridge Community Centre; the first shot in the video is a photo of a young Taylor in a red-fringed tap dancing outfit. “They have that smell and those curtains,” she smiles of those innately familiar spaces. “There’s something about the way that the hall would be the disco and probably where people got vaccinated, and also where they vote, and Brownies and Guides and boxing club and Zumba.

“I saw a Reiki person who knew nothing about me and just overwhelmingly saw a girl in a bedroom with a guitar. Obviously it wouldn’t have been hard to Google that, but it just stuck with me,” she continues. “I was like, fucking hell. You’ve literally engineered your life to be exactly as you wanted it to be, so start enjoying it. Do what that little girl would have wanted. The excitement I felt on those opening nights doing Little Shop of Horrors at Wales High School… I wanted to hit that again.”

“ I was like, fucking hell. You’ve literally engineered your life to be exactly as you wanted it to be, so start enjoying it.”

At this pivotal point in her career, it feels simultaneously heartening, brave, wholly in character and, you suspect, probably slightly frustrating in the eyes of the money-men that Taylor has taken this path. In place of starry guest spots that would best feed the social algorithm, ‘A Complicated Woman’ features collaborations with a trio of firmly alternative female vocalists – Nadine Shah, Moonchild Sanelly and Sue Tompkins of Life Without Buildings – plus a sampled clip from drag queen Meatball on infinitely lip sync-able highlight ‘69’: a ‘Vogue’ meets Nicola Coughlan’s ‘Shoes… More Shoes’ queer bop in which Taylor lists the comparable merits of different sex positions (“If you beg, I will peg…”).

She is confident that the album will be received less well than its predecessor. “I’m prepared for it to get fucking mixed reviews because it’s a lot,” she shrugs. “If I wanted to make more money I should have done ‘Here Come the Girls’ and 10 tracks of empowerment and I’d have a flat. But I haven’t done that.” Instead, ‘A Complicated Woman’ is an album that takes in rousing wranglings with social obligations and the tricksy comfort blanket of booze (‘The Curse’), throbbing beats that cast a withering gaze at emotionally-stunted men (‘Mother’) and the heavy snarl of ‘Lies’: a Shah-featuring ode to being let down time and time again by the society that surrounds you. “When you’re talking about this little girl that I’m trying to connect to, she honestly had no idea that the world would be like this,” Taylor says. “I’m dragging her around with me, and it’s a fucking shocker for her.”

If Self Esteem as a project is intended as “the music version of Boyhood” – a series of documented check-ins that slowly add up to a life – then Taylor at 38 is a little older, a little wiser, and a lot more weary. “Oh, I’m completely weary! I’m like, ‘Fuck this – personally and politically!” she exclaims. “We’re getting nowhere. I’m getting nowhere. I got where I wanted to and I feel worse than ever, and then in the world we feel like we’re making these big moves towards equality and a quality of life for everybody and we’re not. So yeah, I’m weary… aren’t you?!”

Shot throughout it all, however, is the dawning awareness of the stuff that will truly save you: “‘People not things’ is my new mantra,” she notes. It’s there in the goosebump-worthy group vocals of ‘Focus Is Power’ and the nostalgic comfort of ‘If It’s Not Now It’s Soon’ (“Take it back to the beginning before your skin did all its thickening / When you just wanted to sing”), but it’s also in the entire way that Taylor is choosing to go about enacting the Main Character phase of her career. You would not, after all, find many festival-headlining stars spending Christmas playing Answer Smash on Richard Osman’s House of Games.

“It feels ludicrous to me to NOT do things like that, it’s just so fun!” she grins. “My thing was always, even when no one cared about it, that I’d perform like Gaga at the Super Bowl at Camden Barfly – and I still think that’s cool. Princess Nokia won’t go on anything but she went on The Chase and I love that. I do have meetings where I’m like, I’d love a great big chunk of money from a makeup company, but you have to play the game and do the highbrow thing. It’s smoke and mirrors, and as much as I’d love to do that I can’t because I find everything too stupid and funny!”

“ I think people think I’m this positive, confident, in my skin, self esteem-filled thing. But it is on and off, up and down, forever.”

Another step along the path to realising the full vision of Self Esteem as its own wonderfully singular entity will come in April when Taylor debuts her new live show for a four-night run at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre. An attempt to blur the worlds of music and the stage and concoct her version of David Byrne’s American Utopia, Taylor is unsurprisingly thrilled at the idea of finally having the tools to elevate what’s become an integral part of the Self Esteem experience. “At the end of ‘Prioritise Pleasure’, we were still pushing those little shitty steps up onto the stage that were covered in muck,” she recalls. “I was headlining Green Man and there was still just the four of us, scuttling on. There’d be people on before us with full production and then we were like, still in our Nasty Gal turtlenecks.”

A return to the West End following her transformative stint in Cabaret (“The warm ups, the way people cared about if you were alright, the way it wasn’t up to me to run the whole thing…”), the theatre stage feels like a natural home for Taylor more now than ever. She’s been auditioning for more acting roles and “would love to have an Olivia Colman pivot”, but tied up in the world of TV and film is, inevitably and depressingly, an even more concentrated battle against increasingly impossible expectations.

“The one thing I feel sad about is that I want to do more acting and the acting auditions I get offered are always ‘mate’ or ‘friend’, and it’s because I’m not considered hot enough to be a romantic lead. Every woman you ever see on screen – even if it’s about a woman down the pit – everyone is unbelievably beautiful and probably wasn’t born like that. Even the cool motherfuckers are getting bits and bobs done,” she considers. “I’d love to be a big actress, but I don’t think that can happen until I’m out of the age bracket of ‘Could I be the hot girly?’ No, because I’d need a nose job. OK, well we’re back to square one. The casting briefs I get, I’m literally considered rough, and that’s not fair on me or the world. That’s why we’re all ill because we don’t know what the world actually looks like.

“I love that Sabrina Carpenter song [‘Espresso’] so much but you can tell the industry’s like, ‘Oh thank GOD! Thank god she’s hot and blonde and white and tiny – AND good! Thank god!’” Taylor sighs. “You feel like you’re making headway, but the industry still wants what it wants.”

With ‘A Complicated Woman’, then, Rebecca Lucy Taylor probably isn’t what the industry wants or even what a lot of casual spectators might expect. On one hand, she’s a 38-year-old pop star who’s decided to use her big splashy major label debut to launch an album with its artwork based on A Handmaid’s Tale, its promo videos set in a local Sheffield hall, and its music full of frustration, despair and “provocative, sexy shit that’s just a bit too weird for any man to enjoy”. On the other, she’s a public-anointed oracle of 21st Century feminism who’s the first to admit she still is a total work in progress, and who’s spent the last few years in a state of prolonged anxiety. “I think people think I’m this positive, confident, in my skin, self esteem-filled thing. But it is on and off, up and down, forever,” she asserts.

Where ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ felt genuinely radical just four years ago, kick-starting conversations of autonomy and expectation and introducing a new kind of female solo star who could thrive away from the tick boxes and create their own narrative, now those ideas feel practically mainstream. Having shown the industry a different way to break through the system, this time around Self Esteem is showing the world a different way to be a sustained success: one that’s complex and messy, empathetic and angry, silly, sad and funny all at the same time.

“In a way, I feel like this album’s gonna set me free to make 20 more,” Taylor says. “If I came back with a really concentrated, mass appeal pop record then I’m trapped. Then that’s another decade of chasing some huge global Charli xcx-style takeover. Hopefully my music career will be long, but for now it’s: what have I been doing for the last three years and what fucking sense have I made out of it? And that’s the album.”

As always, you can rely on our RLT for a choice nugget of wisdom-slash-ridiculousness.

On relationships…

“As much as it’s about meeting somebody, I think more than anything it’s about you being ready. And that’ll hit you at 18 or 50 or any time in between. I only just stand by anything I say! I don’t know if I stand by the things I said at the start of this interview so how could I have found a life partner?! I think it should be illegal to be with anyone until you’re 40: you should have to apply for a license to me, personally, and I will decide.”

On motherhood…

“There’s a lad in Cabaret called Travis who’s 22 and I just fell in love with him but I didn’t want to shag him and I could not figure it out. I would do anything for that boy, and I think it might be some maternal bollocks.”

On biopics…

“I’ve seen the Robbie Williams film twice - it’s the best film ever. I’m like a shitter, less successful Robbie. Who would play me in my biopic? Jigglypuff? I do look quite like Jigglypuff.”

Styling: Alex Mullins
Make up: Byron London
Hair: Lauren Bell

‘A Complicated Woman’ is out 25th April via Polydor.

Styling: Alex Mullins

Make up: Byron London

Hair: Lauren Bell

Tags: Cover Features, Features, February 2025, From The Magazine, Self Esteem