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Two years ago, on a balmy July evening in London’s Wembley Stadium, Rebecca Lucy Taylor played to the biggest crowd of her career—and had a revelation. Taking to the stage as the support act for Blur’s blockbuster reunion shows, the British musician better known as Self Esteem was surrounded by backing dancers in a loose-fitting white suit and sunglasses, a crowd of 90,000 people chanting her choruses right back at her. (At one point, with typically dry wit, the words “Don’t Fuck Up the Blur Gig” were projected behind.)
She would have a eureka moment that night—not during her own show, actually, but while watching Blur belt out their hits immediately afterwards. “I was just standing watching them, and I realized I want to be exactly like Damon Albarn. That’s what I’ve always wanted,” says Taylor. It wasn’t just Albarn’s maverick career that appealed, but the “traditional” songwriting of the Britpop classics he and the band were performing to an almost comically enthusiastic response. “I did loads of thinking about masculinity, and football crowds... I was a real sporty, tomboy child, and I started reconnecting with her.”
It was this moment that set Taylor down the path to create her third album, A Complicated Woman, out April 25. “I want to make stadium football terrace music for the girls and the gays,” Taylor says with wild-eyed glee, sitting in a glass-walled room of her record label’s offices in central London. “We get cunty, fun music, but we don’t get to scream.”
Having attended one of Taylor’s sold-out shows in support of her breakthrough second record, Prioritise Pleasure, I’m surprised the urge to make scream-worthy music wasn’t already lurking within her somewhere. A frank and deliriously funny self-portrait of a woman on fire, Prioritise Pleasure topped several year-end critic’s lists and was nominated for both a Brit Award and the Mercury Prize—but the real testament to its power was witnessing the biblical zeal of a crowd responding to her searingly honest lyrics and extraordinary stage presence. (You haven’t really experienced the Self Esteem effect until you’ve seen 3,000 millennial women and gay men a few white wines deep shouting along to the album’s title track: “Shave my pussy, that’s just for me! Unfollow you, that’s just for me!”) “People always say it’s like church, although I don’t like saying that, because then people will think I’m a cult leader and I’ll end up in prison,” says Taylor, laughing. “But subconsciously, it does feel like this project is about more than me. And that feels good.”
On A Complicated Woman, Taylor is widening the aperture of her Self Esteem project, both in terms of its subject matter and its sound. The lead single, “Focus Is Power,” features strings, lyrics that wink to the “inspirational” mantras of self-help books, and a full-throated belter of a chorus backed up by a gospel choir. (As The Guardian aptly described it, it “sounds like an X Factor winner’s Christmas single from an alternate universe.”) Then, just when you get comfortable, her second track, “69,” features an eye-popping runthrough of her most and least favorite sex positions (“If you beg, I will peg,” she sings, with a campy whisper, “but I just can’t abide, I’ve never the time, to 69”), and opens with a cameo appearance from one of Taylor’s heroes, drag queen Meatball. Meanwhile, standout track “Mother”—which includes a repeated refrain of “I am not your mother, I’m not your mother, I am not your mum” over thundering percussion—serves as a delicious kiss-off to a man-child ex-boyfriend that feels equal parts Lily Allen and David Byrne. As Taylor herself wryly observes, background music it certainly isn’t. “My music doesn’t stream well, and I’m always like, well that’s because no one puts it on at a dinner party,” she says, throwing up her hands. “You don’t put it on in a shop. Of course I’ve got no streams, because if you’re listening to me, you’re fucking listening to it! And I’m glad. I’m proud of that.”
That confrontational sound took a long time to find. Born and raised in Rotherham, a relatively sleepy Yorkshire mining town, Taylor had her first breakout moment as one half of the folksy indie pop duo Slow Club, whose moderate successes arrived during the heyday of “indie sleaze”—a scene notorious for its boy’s club energy. Taylor has spoken eloquently and often of the misogyny she experienced as an up-and-coming musician in a band, and that she faced again—albeit in a different form—while striking out as a solo act a decade later, in 2019, when releasing her debut album, Compliments Please. “I’m so bruised by my career up until now that I’m still struggling to understand this version of it, where people are actually going to come to see you,” she reflects. “Money is going to be made. You can make art and someone’s going to care about it. That was the dream. I’m living the dream, while also being like, Is this the dream that’s happening right now? Does anyone know?”
Taylor is referring to the head-spinning success that accompanied Prioritise Pleasure, and its lead single, “I Do This All the Time”—an update of Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” soaked in the petrol of millennial angst and set alight via an unforgettably rousing chorus. (If it catches you at a fragile moment, expect to weep.) While her career up to that point was hardly a failure, before her second album, Taylor was more likely to be booked for gigs at libraries and early afternoon festival slots—although, even then, her ambition and passion for spectacle as a performer always outstripped her means. “I usually described Self Esteem shows right at the start as like doing the Super Bowl in Camden Barfly,” she says, with a chuckle. “It was me and two girls doing little dance moves in shit bars. I had left the indie world where trying hard was frowned upon, and so I was like, I’m just going to fucking try hard.” With Prioritise Pleasure, she was catapulted to the kinds of stages she’d always dreamed of.
It was everything she’d always wanted, until she realized it wasn’t. In the whirlwind year that followed, packed with promotional appearances, late-night shows, and non-stop performing, she found herself staring down the barrel of total burnout. What saved her, somewhat counterintuitively, was the West End. In 2022, Taylor composed the soundtrack for the award-winning, Jodie Comer-starring production of the Suzie Miller play Prima Facie, while in September 2023, she began a six-month run as Sally Bowles in Cabaret under her government name, opposite Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. For the first time in her life, Taylor says, she found a semblance of inner peace. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it a lot, because I want many more decades of this career, but it can’t kill me any more,” she says. “How do you achieve that? With Cabaret, it was amazing because I was getting a paycheck, which I realized psychologically felt like safety. I realized part of what had stressed me out all the time, and what I’d always just struggled to describe, was just being freelance.” Also, being able to relinquish creative control was life-changing—though after a few months, the itch to perform her own music again seemed to return. “I really missed it,” she says. “I thought, I really want to do this, but say what I need to say as well.”
In keeping with that spirit, A Complicated Woman arrives with a sold-out, five-night run at the Duke of York’s Theatre in mid-April, on which Taylor is collaborating with the Tony Award-winning designer Tom Scutt, a key member of the Cabaret creative team. How does it feel to finally have the budget to bring some of her more far-fetched, ambitious ideas to life? “What I’ve learned is that you up it all, but you’ve still not got enough,” she says. “I need that Beyoncé Lemonade budget to get what’s in here out properly! Although because I somehow had a career for so long with fuck all, even a little bit of budget has been marvelous. It’s really just a new challenge.”
Within the show, Taylor is planning to expand upon the visual world she’s already built around the record. Each of the videos released so far has featured a local community hall as its backdrop, inspired by the space she’d go to for tap dancing classes as a kid, but here filled with a group of women in their 30s and beyond. (The set for her stage show will include an enormous clock, and Taylor mentions during our conversation that she’s currently both looking to buy her first home and in the process of freezing her eggs, so we’ll leave you to read between the lines there.) Meanwhile, on the cover of A Complicated Woman, she wears a The Crucible-core bonnet crafted from an oversized men’s shirt collar, and is in the middle of letting out a primal scream: female rage suppressed, then released.
She notes that “Focus Is Power” accidentally came out on the day of Trump’s inauguration (“it was just like: fucking hell,” she says of this cosmic alignment) and that putting out a record that casts a forensic eye over the internal debates so many women are wrangling with at this moment—around sexuality, or motherhood, or personal responsibility—feels strangely timely. “I did have this overriding feeling, making this album, of, If I was a man, loads of this wouldn’t have been as hard for me as it has been—really resenting being a woman, really not being sure how I feel about any of it,” she says. “The album is me giving up, but then also being defiant, which I think is what the artwork says.” As for her Salem Fashion Week drag on the cover? “That whole Crucible, Handmaid’s Tale stuff… I think it’s just a really quick way to communicate that whole kitchen sink of wanting to show a woman going mad, because of course she’s going mad, because everything’s fucking bollocks. Even if I was living at a time where we went around wearing bonnets, I’d be feeling the fucking same.”
Speaking of Trump, it’s interesting to observe the disparity between her popularity in Britain and Stateside, where she hasn’t caught on in quite the same way. Does she think the colloquial nature of some of her references—and her deeply British sense of humor—inhibits her ability to translate to an American audience? (Taylor also has a knack for distilling her complicated ideas into clever, cheeky fashion moments—her campy look for Glastonbury included a Blonde Ambition-esque bullet bra featuring the domes of Meadowhall, a regional shopping center in Sheffield.) “It just doesn’t work in America, I don’t think. It was a bit of a thorn in my side for a bit, and maybe having a major label will change that,” she says. “When I was in Slow Club we went loads of times and we’d do three or four weeks of touring driving in a van, sleeping on floors, playing to no one. I don't think I could physically do that again.” Taylor mentions she’s currently obsessed with Better Man, the Robbie Williams biopic that sank without a trace upon its US release; in the UK, Williams serves as one of the best-known examples of a megastar whose success has never quite translated across the pond. “Why do we always have to go to America?” Taylor muses. “I guess the money would be lovely. And I’d love to go and help a load of people over there. But I don't think I could do the whole, ‘Please sir, give me a chance’ thing again. “That’s been my whole career, and I’m trying to let go of it. If you want me, that’s cool. If not, I’ve got plenty of other things going on.”
Right now, that includes a starring role in an as-yet-unannounced new work from one of Britain’s most esteemed playwrights, as well as preparing for her own theatrical run next month by watching endless documentaries about creative titans. (And one about the football manager Brian Clough.) While watching High & Low, the recent film about John Galliano, she found herself less inspired by Galliano than by his right-hand man, Steven Robinson; it was a lesson that, as an artist, she doesn’t have to do everything herself. “Realizing that I can find that people are aligned, work together, create something together is so exciting for my future,” she says, citing her collaboration with Scutt, and the slow process of learning to delegate. Then, as if on cue, the self-doubt creeps in: “It has left me feeling a bit like, Am I lazy?”
What Taylor has to keep reminding herself is that the goalposts don’t always have to move further back—they can move sideways, too. If A Complicated Woman isn’t received in the way she hopes it will be, there’s always another project to jump into. “It’s a mad beast of a fucking album that is very dense, and mental, and weird, and the anticipation of how that’s going to go down is a lot,” she says, noting that she’s made a point to stay off the internet and avoid reading what people have said about it so far. And in classic Self Esteem fashion, Taylor can’t quite figure out whether that’s made her feel more insane or less. “I’m just trucking along,” she sighs. “No more fucking checking how many people have liked my posts, or tearing my hair out because Spotify isn't streaming much. You’ve got a roof over your head. You’ve got a fucking nice life. Keep making work. That’s what I worked hard to be able to do. I’d love to be really rich, and I’d love to have the power that fame and global success gives you. But I don’t need to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s not that my ambition has waned—it’s sort of a healthy resignation in a way. That hunger to just go, go, go…” Taylor smiles sheepishly. It’s complicated.
