More about: Self Esteem

Double denim on. Tit taped up. Rebecca Taylor is ready for her first ever cover shoot. She’s had her hair tinted – a change of tack after years of bleaching – and backcombed. “I want to look like a bisexual Dolly Parton,” she laughs. “Self Esteem: something for everyone.” 

...it’s two weeks earlier, we’re facing each other on Zoom and Rebecca is empathising as I appear bleary-eyed and grey in complexion from an ill-timed stomach bug. “I was basically ill the whole of Slow Club”, she commiserates. She’s radiant in comparison: in part due to the fact of her prettiness, in part because of her openness and easy companionability. But Rebecca has not always been the picture of wellness. Specifically, in that time she was one half of Sheffield indie band Slow Club. “I would get tonsillitis. The ear infections I got in that band! I was just so sad all the fucking time and my body was just like…” She tails off, but the implication is there. Her body was just like ‘fuck this shit’. 

It was much the same, as it so often is, in the mind. “I wasn’t going to jump off a cliff or anything,” she continues, “but I did have a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to carry on if it was like this all the time. I was just so fucking miserable.”

Now of course, things are much better. For one thing, there’s the advantage of growing older. For another, Rebecca has an artistic project that she can actually feel fully part of. Most of you will know Rebecca as Self Esteem: a solo reinvention she began in 2018 and brought to the alternative pop underground in 2019 with her debut album Compliments Please. Insert a three-year montage of performing live, smashing out the therapy sessions and doing pandemic-dictated online exercise classes from her parents’ house in Sheffield here. She didn’t know what would happen – “During the pandemic I was like, everything I’ve ever worked for might be gone forever. So what now?” – but it’s turned out to be quite remarkable. Rebecca is currently making the case for one of the most powerful album campaigns of the year with her second album Prioritise Pleasure, which drops in September and takes its title from one of an endless stream of quotable lyrics in I Do This All The Time. 

You’ll have heard that lead single: I Do This All The Time’s is close to five minutes of The Best Song of the Year. It was performed by Rebecca and her band, with whom she is very close, on Jools Holland last month. It was picked up and playlisted by BBC’s Radio 1, 2 and 6, a rare feat. Not bad for a song her team “didn’t think was a single”. 

In characteristic style: self-deprecating, warmly funny and incisive, ‘I Do This All The Time’ introduces many a theme for the forthcoming album: the problem of grey areas and perception when it comes to sexual assault, self-love, wry put-downs, letting go of societal norms. And yes, ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’ is a big inspiration behind its sage but sometimes smirking delivery of advice: “Clearly” she says, rolling her eyes. 

If you were worried, then stop: the rest of Prioritise Pleasure is quite as good as this extraordinary song proved out of the gate. It was, it turns out, the perfect introduction to what is one great big satisfyingly ugly cry of an album: a perfect streak of twelve could-be singles. ‘Fucking Wizardry’ is a cathartic howl of a song buoyed on relentless percussion, seemingly off-the-cuff verses and a spiritual chorus. “My hunger x my impatience makes me feel reckless”, she sings to the heavens alongside a choir of her peers. ‘Hobbies 2’ follows with a spectacular vocal performance and some battle-worn drumming. “Of course I want more” she sings on its bridge. 

It won’t have passed you by, even in these short examples, that the honesty Rebecca displayed in her debut album continues apace on Prioritise Pleasure. What you won’t fully be able to parse without the advantage of the full album blaring in your ears, is that that honesty has hardened and become feral. Rebecca Taylor does not sound as vulnerable as she once did – nor does she feel it. “I think the first album was me going ‘I feel all this: help!’ and this album is like a reassuring big sister saying it’s all right,” she tells me. “I’m not trying to say I’m fixed now. I think it still sounds fucking complicated but empowered.”

One example: on Prioritise Pleasure’s affecting opening track ‘I’m Fine’, Rebecca can be heard barking and howling like a dog. It’s a goosepimple-inducing moment that follows a defiant stream of lyrics confronting a particular man – or men – for their carelessness, tactility and tendency towards something altogether more sinister. ‘If we are approached by a group of men, we will bark like dogs’ a girl’s voice says on the track, ‘There is nothing that terrifies a man more than a woman that appears completely deranged.’ The girl, Rebecca tells me, is Amanda, a young woman involved in a National Theatre project which gave birth to a piece of theatre inspired by the Irish rape trial in which a man was acquitted of raping a teenager due to the underwear she was alleged to have been wearing at the time. “I was making the album at the same time and it’s very much about dealing with grey areas and the trauma of fucking sexual assault that we’ve all had. The dog barking; I thought that was perfect. I just stood in the studio and howled.”

The catharsis of that moment is one of so many across Prioritise Pleasure. There is no more literal barking, but the howl that the thing lets out as a whole is as animal as it gets. “The album is me coming to terms with living my life in a certain way,” she muses, trying to explain as best she can how the issue of sexual assault and harrassment has translated into her work. “Some things have happened to me that I didn’t really want to happen. This album, and life in general, has started to make me realise...who was in the wrong sometimes.”

“I did a fucking documentary about sexual abuse in the music industry and they cut me completely because I didn’t want to sit there and describe any of my sexual assaults,” she continues. “That’s what they want: they want sensationalism. And you’ve got Johnny Tour Manager who’s probably done a few dodgy things without realising, watching that going ‘That’s not me, I don’t rape people, cool’”. It’s a serious subject, but sometimes it’s more complicated than knowing something was wrong straight away. “I think a lot of women – and men – have those experiences where you go, ‘oh I’m just going to have to block that out’; ‘Not quite sure about that one but it’s fine, it’s fine’. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to go out there and make accusations, it’s more just about acceptance for myself.” 

Rebecca faces the issue head on with her lyrics, which stud the vast cathedral-esque paeans of Prioritise Pleasure. “Yeah, you scare me. Does that make you feel manly?” she asks on ‘I’m Fine’. “I don’t know shit, do I? I don’t know shit and that’s how you live with it” she spits on ‘How Can I Help You’. 

A self-proclaimed therapy evangelist, Rebecca unearthed quite a lot of her new-found clarity and grit through weekly sessions with a specialist she has been seeing for three years. “She was just like ‘you really hate yourself’, and I was like ‘no I don’t, I’m fucking great!’ Now I understand that I do love myself in a genuine way instead of like ‘yeah, bitch! Work!’. I think I’m a better person for it. I think I’m a more giving friend. I’m a better artist.”

The sessions have also allowed Rebecca to understand the things that have happened to her, how they have affected her, and how, though sometimes small, they are not situations wholly of her own making. “I realised that I was bombing through life being like ‘it’s your own fucking fault, you idiot’” she says. 

From her realisations and her therapy, Rebecca has been able to write an album thrumming with a complicated, but very much powerful, new energy. More choirs come to the fore on title track ‘Prioritise Pleasure’ to make the point. On it, Rebecca and her friends are given another purifying chorus that bursts from fractured synths like flowers from cracks in an old building. It seems very much as though the experience of recording these sections also provided therapy for Rebecca and her friends. “Most people that have sang with me live came, and my best friend; there’s a choir of about six of us. We just went and did a day honking it out. I was such a fucking wreck all day, I just kept crying.”

Crying, as any true therapy evangelist will know, is excellent for you, and since Prioritise Pleasure is very likely to make you do just that, it can probably count as a vigorous therapy session in itself. On ‘The 345’, Rebecca sings for all of us as she sings directly to herself: ‘I just want you to know there’s a point in you, and I know you find it harder than your peers do’ she belts. It’s a song that, like ‘I Do This All The Time’ and ‘I’m Fine’, offers some stoic and comforting advice despite moments of uncertainty. In a spoken passage on ‘The 345’, Rebecca shows her vulnerability, still, as she fumbles with the right words to deliver to her future self. But she doesn’t always struggle. As her social media presence often shows, Self Esteem is a fitting moniker as often as it is not. “Fucking hell: as soon as you figure out that not a lot matters, it’s blissful” she says, smiling but serious. “Food and sleep and dancing, it’s not hard. We don’t need much. I used to want so much and need so much and I was devastated that I wasn’t like everyone else. Now I’m surrounded by people who are very similar and very accepting.”

As she grows up and out of the tangle of nerves and neuroses that are being twenty-something, even big, concrete societal expectations are having trouble casting shade on Rebecca’s life. “I’m gonna fucking normalise aging for women” she blusters, half laughing, half groaning at my assertion that teens on TikTok often show amazement that anyone over the age of 24 looks at all youthful. “People always go ‘wow! 34! Gosh, I wouldn’t have thought that’. And I’m like okay? It’s not a compliment that I look good for a certain age. Why wouldn’t I? It’s insane how ashamed we are of it.” She’s convinced - and with considerable societal evidence it has to be said - that the issue is tied up with the dogma of motherhood. 

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t [have children], but I’m also certainly not going to stop what I’m doing to do it yet” she says. She pauses, remembering how irritating the subject can be and raising her voice to mirror the fact. “There’s not many people banging the drum that you’re not a loser if you don’t [have children]. You’re not a sad, single old crone if you don’t. It’s not sad if it doesn’t happen for you. I’m not bashing anyone that does. I just think there’s not enough people saying otherwise.” 

It’s not that she might not want children, it’s that “the whole world has told us to do one thing. If you do that, it doesn’t mean you’re an idiot and if you don’t do that it doesn’t mean you’re a freak.”

It was the pandemic, too, that helped Rebecca to see more clearly, perhaps not as surprising a result of the period as we might have come to expect. “The pandemic is the first time that I’ve been in one place for a long time.The first time I’ve not been on a stage since I was 16. No spikes of adrenaline; no going out; no fucking about and not seeing people. For the first time ever it’s a real back to basics thing for my body.” The result was a realisation that FOMO is bullshit, actually. “The pandemic taught me that I used to live like I had to be in London in case [something] happens. If someone wanted me to go out to something I’d be like ‘yeah’ whether or not I wanted to. Now I realise that I’m unhappy wherever I am if I’m doing that. It felt like I was always pleasing other people. I spent a year alone and I was fine.”

In the pandemic, Rebecca fired up her long-time goal of running an exercise class. ‘Steam by Self Esteem’ - tagline ‘summert is better than nowt’. She lived quietly in Sheffield. And she made an extraordinary album. “It was the easiest, most enjoyable thing I’ve ever made in my whole life,” she tells me. There was only one “head-scratcher” - ‘You Forever’ - but that worked itself out in the end too. “I had a disgruntled few months where I thought I wouldn’t be able to make what I want to make. And then I think it coincided with a few things making more sense for me mentally and I thought ‘just go in and make it!’”

Did she have any deliberate intentions for her second album, both as a part of her and as a follow-up to Compliments Please? “I always want consistency, but not boring consistency,” she says. “I take what I’ve already done and turn every element up to 11 or whatever. Choir? Bigger choir. Strings? More strings. Bass? Darker, fatter bass. I just wanted everything to go up a level.” 

It’s a far cry from that sickly, sad teenager and young twenty-something who appeared on stage all over the world as part of Slow Club. “I feel really sorry for her, but I also think that she had to go through that to get to here”, she continues. “I use the term loosely, but I’m so happy.”

As schmaltzy as it sounds, happiness is a journey, and that is something Rebecca seems to have fully embraced. I go back to the theme of recklessness and impatience that pops up throughout Prioritise Pleasure. They’re both emotions of contention for her; places in which she’s still learning how to find peace. “My recklessness is the problem. I was reckless with myself, allowing someone to really disrespect me because I wanted to feel like I’d finally found it. My fantasy is that I go and I have a nice home in Sheffield, and that factored into how badly I let someone treat me. That’s my impatience and my hunger for this finish.”

“Since that relationship I’ve really, really learned,” she tells me, “If you take out the whole ‘happy-ever-after’ that is coursing through my veins, I’m not bothered. I’m happy! Life’s quite nice!”

Prioritise Pleasure arrives 29 October via Fiction Records.

Issue Two of the Gigwise Print magazine is on sale now! Buy it here.

More about: Self Esteem