Self Esteem: The pop star's theatrical extravaganza proves she's worth the hype

Telegraph

17-04-2025

Last time Rebecca Lucy Taylor – the artist behind the Self Esteem moniker – went on tour, she made no bones about the limited budget at her disposal. But two years on, much has changed. Those shows and their corresponding album, Prioritise Pleasure, earned Taylor a new level of success (and a major label deal), evident in the scaled-up production and hype at London's Duke of York's Theatre on Wednesday night, where all eyes were on the debut of a new tour and album: A Complicated Woman.
The show began as a play might: curtain rising to reveal Taylor slouched on the kind of plastic chair you'd see in a school or village hall, her back to the crowd, smoking a cigarette with the energy of an off-duty dinner lady. She's no stranger to a theatre stage – she played Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the end of 2023 – and this five-night West End run leans into that side of her identity.
But it was still very much a pop show rather than a play. Taylor – kitted out like one of Margaret Atwood's handmaids in a white headpiece and smock – opened with a new song, I Do And I Don't Care, its spoken word and communal choruses picking up where she left off with Prioritise Pleasure favourite I Do This All The Time. Ten dancers, all sporting the same dystopian get-up, joined the stage as the mood transformed from church ceremony to nun nightclub for second song Mother, a basement throb about immature men: 'I am not your mother, I am not your mum'. So far, so Self Esteem.
Theatre designer Tom Scutt, who also worked on Pet Shop Boys' recent Dreamworld tour, helped turn the Victorian theatre into a provincial community centre that, as the evening went on, played host to an AA meeting, a PE class, an aerobics gym, and local disco. Taylor's original trio of dancers were a crucial part of the success of the Prioritise Pleasure tour and the inflated troupe only capitalised on that power, choreographer Stuart Rogers clearly having fun with a larger posse.
Everything felt bigger, yet everything felt reassuringly familiar: the 'girl gang' energy, Taylor's frank humour, her lyrics that nail how it feels to be a woman on the other side of your twenties. New songs such as Mother and 69 – a musical rating of sex positions, after which Taylor asked the crowd 'is my dad alright?' – channelled a Charli CXC-style club mood, but as Taylor pointed out in a recent interview, 'every brat turns 38'. The bulk of the night's material operated from this more mature perspective: The Curse's boozy strum, uplifting lead single Focus Is Power, and final song The Deep Blue Okay, which provided the same twinkling piano euphoria as LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends.
Self Esteem's strength has always been as a live act, and the theatre provided exactly the right setting for her music: her lyrics earning laughs as if they were lines in a comedy play, the songs wrestled from charity single territory into witty empowerment anthems that found their full strength and natural home as a high-budget stage extravaganza, steered by a leading lady like no other.