Way back in 2019, Rebecca Lucy Taylor said she envisioned her career as Self Esteem as being The People’s Pop Star – a beloved national treasure as comfortable on Graham Norton’s sofa as on the biggest stages in the country. Those aspirations largely materialised with her seismic second album ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ in 2021, but Self Esteem’s journey has proven much more nuanced, messy and fractured than those early widescreen visions, culminating in her third album ‘A Complicated Woman’.
“I’d love to be someone who isn’t relatable, someone who is an untouchable goddess like Charli, Sabrina or Chappell, but I just can’t,” laughs Rebecca. “No matter how hard I try to be cool and elusive. I like the things that are funny about life and self-deprecating. I get a lot of comfort in sharing the truth about myself, but then I get wound up that I’m not as cool as Charli xcx, and I’m like, well, that’s because you tell people about your wind problem. You can’t have both. I’d love to be taken very, very seriously, but I also want to have a laugh.”
Rebecca has certainly come a long way since starting Self Esteem. “My life is very different,” she says. The rolling juggernaut of ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ and its impact prompted a step back from chasing ecstatic highs. “When I did [recent theatre production] Cabaret, it was the first time in so long that I had routine, and fortunately, I loved it,” she smiles. “My hobbies are going to bed early and reading more books. Also, I really love washing clothes,” she laughs. What follows, Dear Reader, is an exclusive pop star washing tip unavailable anywhere else. Other brands are available, but this one is officially pop star-endorsed. “There’s this brand called Tallow+Ash. It’s like perfume. It’s just so gorgeous; I’m addicted to it.”
“I get wound up that I’m not as cool as Charli xcx, and I’m like, well, that’s because you tell people about your wind problem”
Rebecca has been reconnecting with media that tackles the pesky notion of ‘cool’. “I’m watching things that I never did,” she explains. “I never watched [TV show] Girls when it came out, and no one can believe that about me. I’m finally watching Girls now, 20 years later. It’s just phenomenal, fucking hell it’s just so accurate to what a narcissist you are in your twenties. The clothes are so hideous. I love stuff like that and the indie sleaze Instagram account. I still get quite stressed by the idea of cool and what cool is and whether I am it, especially in my twenties with those indie discos and the way girls dressed at them. I was like fuck sake, I’ll never look like that, and I’ll never be that cool. You look at that account now, and you’re like, oh wow, everyone looks so stupid. Trend has to move on, and it’s immediately quite embarrassing.”
Recognising that everything is transient and accepting conflicting desires, feelings, and emotions is central to Self Esteem’s evolution. Pop music matters and life can be serious, but it can also be ridiculous, silly, confrontational and heartbreaking simultaneously. Cool and uncool in equal measure. “That’s the point of the album,” says Rebecca passionately. “You don’t have to be one single thing all the time, life contains many different parts of ourselves. I do feel like I used to hide behind it a little bit. Shit goes wrong all the time when you’re on stage. I’ve always been a bit, phhh lol haha, of course it’s me. ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ charted at Number 11, and that’s so Self Esteem. It’s such a me thing to not quite be you, and I do like the idea of one day it being me, but I don’t think it will be, and that’s fine.”
The success of ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ has fundamentally shaped Rebecca’s last five years. “It just started to go so crazy, but it went crazy very slowly,” she recalls. Everyone talks about eras in pop now, but the ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ era truly was a monster. It stretched on relentlessly – interview after interview, festival after festival, photoshoot after photoshoot.
“I’m realising that I really burned out,” admits Rebecca. “I hate buzzy terms for things on the internet, but burnout, everything that it lists happened. What I think happened last time because it was so unassuming and we didn’t think it was going to happen, you said yes. It’s clunky language, but you say yes to a group of press that’s good for you to do, the sort of stuff you often get, so you’re hooked up with that. You’re adding stuff, there’s bigger opportunities coming, there’s huge opportunities coming, so you’re saying yes to that but you’ve still got your commitments you already had. It was 6 months behind at all times doing things I didn’t need to do. Not that I think any magazine is more important than any other one, but you just can’t do it all, and due to the nature of how it went, I ended up doing it all, and towards the end, there was a whole new thirst from a whole different type of media that you couldn’t turn down. I should have. I didn’t protect myself at all. I got really poorly.”
Rebecca describes touring her live show during the final year of festivals, illustrating how both creative and financial resources dwindled as demand surged. “That’s why I put in so much budget and time and people into the live show this time, because that boggles my brain so much,” she says wearily. “I was one person trying to make a show that had to keep evolving. The funniest thing about it, because you’ve still got no money you see, it looks like you’re everywhere, but there’s still fucking nothing to work with as you don’t make any money. I had these little marble stairs made, we got some costumes and stuff and really cobbled it together, but by the end of festival season and the third year of ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ being out, we were on penultimate or headlining at festivals but had no time or resources to put it up a level. We were going to festivals and artists way bigger than me with more finances and huge production, and lights would be on before me, and we’d just wheel my little shitty steps on, and we’d be there in fast fashion outfits. It kind of destroyed me. I find it deeply stressful. I’m so emotional about it. I’m so attached to it. I can’t switch off. I can’t trust that anyone else can do it.”
“I hate buzzy terms for things on the internet, but burnout, everything that it lists happened”
This time, Rebecca plans to do things differently while maintaining her vision. “It’s working smarter, not harder. That’s the MO this time.” As she enters the new era for ‘A Complicated Woman’, there are tangible benefits that enable her to fully realise the Self Esteem vision. “It’s not like I’m rolling in cash now, but I’m finally able to have an idea and put it into practice,” she says. “Paying talented people to come on board and help me realise my idea. That is the fucking best. I kind of think that might be why I do it. So much about it has been so lonely so there’s something about being able to buy people and their time to be able to come with me and make art with me.”
Many people have been on the Self Esteem journey with her from the start. Indeed, so have we – Dork did the first interview with Rebecca as Self Esteem back in 2017 when her old band Slow Club were still (barely) functioning, and she was focused on making Rihanna-style pop beats and expressing her personality fully for the first time. “I was so nervous to do that, but that really signalled that it was a thing,” she says fondly, remembering that fateful chat. What followed are three albums of clever, insightful and gloriously exuberant pop.
“I always saw it as a trilogy,” says Rebecca. “I kind of want to say the next album won’t be Self Esteem, it will be Rebecca Lucy Taylor, but I don’t think anyone at a record label will let me do that. It was always sonically going to be a trilogy. It wanted to work with the same producer and use the same elements. The more access to resources I get that’s the development of the idea. ‘Compliments Please’ was just me and Galps [long-time collaborator and multi-talented performer Sophie Galpin] singing for our lives 20 times in different places in the room, making the choir up, and ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ I had an 8-person singing day that made the choir, but this time I thought, I’m on a major label, let’s get a gospel choir.
“It was the same with strings. All the strings come out of my head, but I just have no musical notation or theory. I can’t do any of that. I’ve always dreamed of being able to sing what’s in my head with the strings and send that to someone who’s a music boff and arranging it like a proper string arranger.” ‘A Complicated Woman’ is the same but on a bigger scale. “I didn’t want to 180,” she confesses. “I was very tempted to totally change where I was going, but I knew that I couldn’t because it’s a bit of a cop out, I think.”
“So much of womanhood for me is about performance”
The success of ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ meant this was the first record of Rebecca’s career where there was tangible expectation. “It was an insane amount of pressure,” she says. “‘Prioritise Pleasure’ became this weirdly cult album but still had barely any sales or streams. No one streams it! I sold quite a lot of hard copies, but no one fucking streams the thing.” This is one of the peculiarities of the music industry in the 2020s – you can feel simultaneously in a whirlwind where everything and nothing is happening. Rebecca had created something people deeply loved and critically acclaimed, but it wasn’t hitting those metrics while still making her in demand. It was embracing projects outside of music that allowed her to finally move on from ‘Prioritise Pleasure’. That’s always driven Self Esteem: What’s next?
“I’ve started the next album already now,” she laughs. Rebecca took on the starring role as Sally Bowles alongside Jake Shears in the West End play Cabaret in late 2023, providing a catalyst for new creativity. “It taught me a lot, and it changed my life actually doing it. I was still writing during it but I had very little Self Esteem commitments. That became the full stop on ‘Prioritise Pleasure’, but I had already started on ‘A Complicated Woman’, and I knew what I wanted it to be.” Befitting the title, the process was far from straightforward. “It wasn’t pleasant,” she says ruefully. “I haven’t had a good time making it.”
Some of that unpleasantness stems from Self Esteem’s internal conflicts – between the new, universally beloved pop star and the earlier, inward-looking, self-loathing artist who had much to say but struggled to express it. Combined with the pressure to match previous success, one can understand the challenge. “I was so not alright when I was making it that it sort of happened to me,” she expands. “It feels like I wrote it through gritted teeth. I wanted 5 years off, and then I would have made the perfect third album that I wanted to make, but I just couldn’t do that. I knew I had to make something, and the time was now. I had a sonic vision for it, but I didn’t know lyrically where it would be going.
“The savvy thing to have done would be to do something really poppy and crossover, not complicated and not dense. A nice 12-track album that has three big Radio 2 singles on it. I keep saying this, but because I could win The Apprentice right, there’s a part of me that is like, well, do the thing that will win. That was the smart thing to do. But then the artist in my tummy and who I actually am came out. I’ve been very scared because I think the album is what you would expect, but it’s so complicated and dense and whiplashy and I think that’s quite shocking about it.”
“I’ll go to my deathbed trying to find peace and calm and balance”
It’s intense, but that’s fitting. Life is intense, and ‘A Complicated Woman’ reflects that. When we spoke to Rebecca in 2021, she said she had nothing to prove to anyone, but on this record, she seems to be proving something to herself. Several tracks are scathing and vulnerable, particularly ‘The Curse’, which examines alcohol’s soothing qualities with its choral crescendo of “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work”. Self Esteem has always written honest lyrics, but here, they carry a different weight that makes them particularly stark.
“It reflects where I was at,” explains Rebecca. “‘Compliments Please’ down to the title was all about me and look at me and validate me and on ‘Prioritise Pleasure’, I worked out nah, that’s bullshit, validate yourself. The smart thing to have done on album three was a much more uplifting ‘I’m alright now’ album, but it’s not that simple. In life, around the time I wrote ‘Prioritise Pleasure’, I was like, yeah, that’s it, don’t rely on other people for your validation, make sure you’re alright, keep fucking working, be independent. I was like, ok I’ve solved it, that’s life. And of course, it isn’t. You’re just at the bottom of the next complicated hill. A lot of it is self-scathing because I’ve reconciled with a lot of mistakes I’ve made, and I see it clearly. I can see why I did the things I did or felt the way I felt.”
Among many striking lines is the intro to album highlight ‘If Not Now It’s Soon’: “Everything you are, everything you see, everyone’s got used to who you pretend to be” – an example of the internal questioning at the record’s heart. So, if she was pretending before, what was she pretending to be? “So much of womanhood for me is about performance,” she responds. “There’s a Margaret Atwood quote about how we perceive ourselves through the male gaze. My complicity in the patriarchy is me realising that, and I’m very angry with myself about that. I’ve always been, ok, this is me; I’m being me. The more work I do on myself, though, and the calmer and more peaceful I make my life, I go, hang on a minute, that wasn’t you at all. That was an idea of you. Again, I could win The Apprentice, right? It’s not specific to romantic relationships, but as an example, if I meet someone, I’ll become who I think they want every fucking time. I do that broadly and personally without realising.”
“It’s hard to try and be safe,” she continues. “Everything for me is about being safe, physically safe, mentally safe, and unfortunately, it’s part of being a woman that you code switch to make sure you’re safe. For this album, I was thinking, imagine if you didn’t have to do that and didn’t have to operate at that level every day in your brain. We have more tabs open than men do in terms of our safety. What songs would I write if I didn’t feel like this? What energy would I have? Everyone pretends, and the goal is to pretend as little as possible. I see it now. I can be in rooms where I can be myself, and it’s bliss, and in rooms where I don’t feel like myself. After ‘Prioritise Pleasure’, I did so many events – red carpets, parties – and I thought I should love this, but I’d be drinking to make myself comfortable enough to be there. Then you realise you don’t love this, you hate it, and the boozing is helping you cope. With a heavy heart on this album, I’m like, I don’t think I like going to these things, I don’t like all eyes on me, I don’t like making famous friends. It all makes me nervous. I’m a lot more shy than I realised. It’s weird. I’m 38 now. Things start to change, and different things become important. It’s been really hard because I’m like, am I fucking loser? Am I lame now?”
A fucking loser would never make an album with moments as confrontational and wild as the punishing industrial house grooves of the electronic dance tracks that sit at the heart of the album as a counterpoint to the choral gospel beauty. “The more I make music as a solo artist, I have a system within the band where if we’re doing a sexy dance move, you’ve got to make one thing wonky so no one can quite enjoy it,” laughs Rebecca. “It’s the same with music. It’s salad and chips. I have to have balance. I put ’69’ out because I put ‘Focus Is Power’ out first, and it’s such an uplifting, genuinely saccharine song that I thought that can’t be just what comes out first. You have to know that there’s this other side.”
Was there ever a feeling to really cut loose and drop something as startling as ’69’ first? “No, not necessarily but I just didn’t feel comfortable as being one thing,” she answers. “That’s just interesting in terms of being alive and becomes the point of the album. Expectation and the way the world wants everyone in boxes and binary, right and wrong, good and bad and in a meta way I do that in the music to make it more a full 360 experience. The album had to be complicated. I wanted you to finish the album and feel exhausted. I’m fully prepared for some male journalists to give it a review and say it’s too complicated and dense with too many ideas, but that’s the fucking point.”
‘A Complicated Woman’ is a maximalist triumph from an artist unafraid to throw everything at a song to realise their vision. Nothing is off-limits. Swearing is actively encouraged. This is a very filthy album – direct and confrontational but tender and enveloping. There are rousing moments of celebratory joy like the Peggy Mitchell behind the bar at the Queen Vic address of ‘Cheers To Me’ taking aim at “each and every fucker that made me this way” and moments of savage scorn on ‘Mother’ and ‘Lies’, all the way to the life-affirming climax of album closer ‘The Deep Blue Okay’.
The album is a triumphant statement encompassing everything Rebecca set out to do with Self Esteem, filtered through the wisdom and enlightenment she’s gained through years of turmoil and self-doubt. “I wanted to get to where Slow Club had got to but by doing what I wanted to do,” she says, recalling Self Esteem’s earliest ambitions. “If my life was always going to be driving in a van to a 500 capacity venue in the UK I wanted that stage to be much more interesting for me to be on. That’s all I set out to do. The way I did that was to work solidly all the time and the goal was to be a global megastar. If you aim for global megastar, you’ll end up somewhere. That’s been my ethos.
“Over the years, the idea of huge global fame immediately became for one thing: it’s not going to happen, and then, of course, that’s not what I want. The more I work with other people and get other people involved and push what you can do with a song and the story you can tell and make people feel from a song I’m just so fucking into that. I definitely wanted attention and to be in the middle with the lights on me, but obviously, that’s matured and was clearly a backlash from a decade of not being the person in the middle of the stage. I was really hurt. People thought I didn’t write songs in Slow Club. I still struggle now when people think I don’t produce my records or write the parts.”
The ambition for Self Esteem has become more nuanced, personal and complex, but that’s what drives Rebecca’s creative vision. “I would love to make a lot of money because that makes me feel safe. Unless you’ve fallen into privilege, it’s a very unartistc thing to say, but the goal is to make enough money so that I don’t have to be scared about my future. I just want to make dynamic, interesting projects and find other people to work with and put my ideas through. I’m excited. It feels possible. It feels like I could do an album; I could do another show. I love it when I do any of that. Radio presenting: I love doing that; I find that really fun and nicer for me emotionally. I want to do it all. What I no longer have is desire to have fame and a look at me thing about it. I think that’s deeply embarrassing now.”
Rebecca Lucy Taylor has reflected deeply on herself as a woman, pop star, acclaimed West End leading lady, drag aficionado, devoted Coronation Street fan and beloved British artist since starting Self Esteem. In 2017, she told Dork that Self Esteem was about “strength, love and standing up for yourself”. Does that still ring true in 2025? “Yes, but I acknowledge the other side of that, and you can’t do one without the other,” she reflects. “I realised that from the three album titles, it’s like: give me validation, I’m going to give it myself, wait a minute, it’s not that simple. I’ll go to my deathbed trying to find peace and calm and balance. Each album will hopefully have some further insight that I’ve managed to have until I’m a divine being by the end.” If she doesn’t quite want to be a global megastar anymore, a peaceful divine being is a worthy alternative.
Taken from the May 2025 issue of Dork. Self Esteem’s album ‘A Complicated Woman’ is out 25th April.
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