Rebecca Lucy Taylor, or Self Esteem, as you may know her, is showing me a viral photo on her phone of a disapproving Rod Stewart, after I inform her that they’re going to be neighbours in Radio Times.
We meet at her record company offices in London on a glorious day, although, now at the tail end of the campaign for her latest album A Complicated Woman, she has been cooped up inside and merely able to look over the revellers in buzzy King Cross. Casually dressed in a vintage Levi’s jacket, her long blonde hair often played with for a touch of self-soothing, she’s gradually melting into the sofa, sustaining herself with energy drinks, clearly exhausted from a day – and many weeks before that – of talking to people like me.
Maybe it’s the Yorkshire sense of humour, maybe it’s the years upon years of struggling at the indie end of the music business as part of Sheffield band Slow Club, or maybe it’s just that awkward millennial blend of ambition, emotional armour, and existential dread, but somehow, we’ve arrived at a moment where 38- year-old Taylor and her on-stage moniker now find themselves hovering somewhere around success. “I definitely don’t see myself as famous at all,” she says. “But then if I said something offhand about a political issue, it might make some news and I might get a load of grief. So that’s a really weird place to be in because I’m just Becky from Anston.”
Self Esteem is an artist who channels the frustrations and ridiculousness of modern existence –particularly that of a woman –into music that’s designed to both provoke and be danced to. Her shows are performance pieces – silly, bombastic and affecting all at once. Please note the aforementioned Glasto performance where she wore a take on Madonna’s infamous conical bra, only in the form of the glass domes of Sheffield’s Meadowhall shopping centre. “That was more than just silly, because it’s territorial and it tells you where I’m from. It opened in 1990 and malls were American, exciting, and I’d never left the country… I’d barely left the village. It was a window into show business, celebrity, shiny things and aspiration.”
Talking of aspiration, there’s the small matter of recently starring as Sally Bowles in the 2023 London production of Cabaret, an experience that resonated with her in a few ways. “Sally wants to do whatever she wants. She’s partying, she’s crazy, she’s living outside of the norm. The idea of having a baby, a husband and a quiet life – peace and security – she has written that off, and so she’s doubling down on that other side of herself. I mean, if that ain’t me!”
Such nonchalance, bolshiness and self-doubt can be heard in her 2021 breakthrough second album Prioritise Pleasure, particularly lead single I Do This All the Time: “All you need to do, darling, is fit in that little dress of yours; If you weren’t doing this, you’d be working in McDonald’s…” I put it to her that her compositions – which cover imposter syndrome, body issues and the patriarchy – are as much about a generational issue, specifically millennials, as they are feminist, switching between existential angst and trying to be the One in Charge. “Yeah, I don’t think they’re exclusively about being a woman. It’s sort of the curse of our generation, because we’re supposed to be the adults in the room now, and it just doesn’t feel like it. I feel like a big baby… I can’t believe I’m not 15!”
It sounds as if the new thing she’s going to be bringing to the festival this year is a sense of agency. “I can create my own destiny now,” she agrees. “If the world is saying, ‘You shouldn’t look like that’, I [still] go through the emotions of embarrassment or shame… and then I’m like, oh, hang on a minute, I make the rules now. And so Self Esteem is mostly me just going through that circle, over and over.”
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