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The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Self Esteem: A Complicated Woman review
Last week, London's Duke of York's theatre played host to an elaborate four-night live staging of Self Esteem's third album. Devised by Self Esteem herself – Rebecca Lucy Taylor – along with Tony award-winning theatrical director and designer Tom Scutt, it was rapturously received by critics, and seemed to speak of an entirely understandable confidence on Taylor's part. Since 2017, she has completely reinvented herself, from one half of middle-ranking indie duo Slow Club into an on-her-own-terms pop star. Her second album as Self Esteem, 2021's Prioritise Pleasure, was a critical and commercial success, shifting her into the realm of breakfast TV interviews and appearances on The Graham Norton Show and Celebrity Bake-Off. She also has a burgeoning career as an actor, having played Sally Bowles in a West End production of Cabaret opposite Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears. Her success has meant that, on Prioritise Pleasure's follow-up, she was finally afforded a recording budget sufficient to do what she always wanted: grand ambitions involving choirs and orchestras. But, by her own account, the making of A Complicated Woman was fraught. Taylor was racked with self-doubt and plagued by twin worries: that if it took too long to make, her career would lose momentum, and that at 38, she was too old to be a pop star anyway. She apparently considered quitting music entirely. Some of those concerns have evidently seeped into the songs. The music on A Complicated Woman reaches for feelgood stadium singalongs, evokes sweaty dancefloors and aims itself at the dead centre of 21st-century mainstream pop. There are moments where the lyrics match the sound: 69 combines distorted rave-era-evoking beats and an explicit checklist of what Taylor does and doesn't enjoy in bed (winningly, given that it variously mentions pegging, scissoring and the reverse cowgirl position, it was released as a single); Mother's grimy house pulse is topped with a blistering dismissal of a self-absorbed ex that contains the impressively sick burn: 'Are you interested in growing? There is other literature outside of The Catcher in the Rye.' But for the most part, the songs thrash about and contradict themselves as if Taylor is, right in front of your ears, working out exactly how she feels about ageing, drinking or her career. This approach sometimes feels brave and fascinating – The Curse's examination of a complex relationship with alcohol is affectingly realistic and relatable, declining to resort to either wellness bromides or let's-party nihilism. But sometimes it feels confusingly opaque. The tellingly titled I Do and I Don't Care revisits the spoken-word approach of her breakthrough single I Do This All the Time, but in place of that song's chord-striking list of sexist remarks there's a brain-dump stream of consciousness. It's tough to work out what she's driving at, whether the song's string-laden conclusion ('We're not chasing happiness any more, girls / We're chasing nothing / The great big still / The deep blue OK') is positive or incredibly bleak. To which Taylor might reasonably respond: that's the point, stupid. This is anthemic-sounding music about ambiguity, perhaps striving to bond people together without providing pat answers in deeply uncertain times. She has mentioned Elbow's reliably roof-raising One Day Like This as a model for part of the album's sound and you can hear its influence in the massed vocals and swelling orchestration that liberally pepper A Complicated Woman. But you're occasionally struck by the sense that it's trying a little too hard to rouse its audience into a mass singalong. There are moments when the choir arrives and you think 'them again?' – closer The Deep Blue Okay marries them to a fidgety piano line and ends up sounding like a cross between LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends and something off The Greatest Showman soundtrack, a deeply peculiar cocktail. The likes of Mother, or the noisy Nadine Shah-featuring Lies, are more powerful for the choir's absence. A Complicated Woman is a bold experiment that you couldn't call a failure – there are good things there, that underline how vastly improved the world of pop is for having Self Esteem in it – but doesn't always come off with the efficacy Taylor might have hoped. As the reviews of the Duke of York's show suggest, it might well work better live, aided by the fact that Taylor is a fantastic performer – you can easily imagine Cheers to Me's defiant coda ('but mostly cheers to me') being bellowed back at the stage by a vast crowd, taking on a new potency in the process. Its author has recently talked about pursuing her acting career further: perhaps A Complicated Woman belongs on the stage too. A Complicated Woman by Self Esteem is released by Polydor on 25 April Lady Wray – Be a Witness Lady Wray continues to pilot her own peculiar path through soul music: Be a Witness is lush, summery and synth-heavy, but intriguingly lo-fi, as if it were recorded off the radio decades ago.
The Guardian
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Self Esteem review
Hard-edged digital club music throbs from the theatre stage – a place mostly in darkness, its shadows hiding a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist. Standing in a row, glaring at the theatre audience, are Self Esteem and 10 dancers. They are not dancing. It's a tense, delicious contradiction. The company stand stock-still for what feels like ages, clad in bonnets, collars and black gowns – half convent, half Gilead. When they do move, it's just their heads at first, glaring accusatively at one spotlit audience member. Gradually, these halting and jerky gestures become spasms, which become seizures, until finally the tension is released into something akin to dancing. The propulsive music, meanwhile, comes from one of the best tracks from Self Esteem's brand new album, A Complicated Woman, released next week. Mother finds Rebecca Lucy Taylor telling a lover how she is not there to parent them. 'Work on your own shit,' she sneers. Taylor's forthrightness is made up of equal parts fed-up, straight-talking northerner and arts-leaning OnlyFans dominatrix. 'Are you interested in growing?' she demands witheringly. 'There is other literature outside of The Catcher in the Rye.' While it's very much a banger from the present, there are hints here of Underworld and of Peaches – the grand dame of 00s underground sex-positive club music, whose work was full of hard emotional reckonings. This five-night theatrical presentation of Self Esteem's new album is very much an ensemble piece in which group singing and moving as a mass are as important as the singular pop star at the front. Taylor cites David Byrne's American Utopia tour as a source, but there's a lot of Mitski in here too. The performers move like a murmuration of starlings around Taylor. Lies – a new song about the falsehoods we tell others to make them comfortable and how we believe them ourselves because it's easier – plays out as a seated circle, with the lights revealing the foreboding Club Gilead space around the performers to be a well-used community hall; piled-up benches, visible backstage clutter. The climax of the first act, however, finds the performers cavorting in a tableau of simulated carnality; Hieronymus Bosch via High School Musical. Later, everyone will be in football kits, doing lunges to 69, a song about sexual positions. And we're back! Taylor's last album, 2021's unmissable Prioritise Pleasure, perfectly bottled a set of feelings about her life and times that pointed up the ferocious contradictions of contemporary womanhood, queer and straight. It resonated hard, catapulting Self Esteem from cult act to flavour of the moment as the post-pandemic era prompted many into similar recalibrations. Stop people-pleasing, FFS, was the album's overarching message to all comers; please yourself. When the album's cycle reached its end, Taylor took on other work, most notably a role in Cabaret. She credits that experience with teaching her a degree of self-care; another way of making art that could be less gruelling than the indie rock method. Taylor spent many years in a band, Slow Club, before being reborn as DIY pop maximalist; she ran herself into the ground touring Prioritise Pleasure, anyway. Hence this show, which will – Self Esteem has hinted elsewhere – be followed by a more conventional tour. It starts off sublime; an unexpected highlight (if that's the right word) is a projected image of the South African polymath Moonchild Sanelly, a guest on the album, weeping silently circa In Plain Sight. 'What the fuck you want from me?' Sanelly cries, in playback, and the choir swell to join her. Gradually, the show becomes less like an artistic statement about the threat to women's autonomy and the complexities of getting what you want and still having to work on your own shit regardless, and more like a gig. Last album hits such as Wizardry and I Do This All the Time punctuate the run of new songs: a reasonable tactic that gets people up and out of their seats. It really is great to hear them again, in the company of others, but it still feels like a slight dilution of Taylor's stark vision tonight. Self Esteem's fans love her for many reasons. One is Taylor's sense of humour – or more specifically, her compulsion to puncture pomposity with a wink. Many will feel that this evening's triumphant return hits a crescendo around the perky dance pop of Cheers to Me, with a message in hot pink projected on a screen: 'Please do the dance on TikTok I want to buy Janet and Andy a caravan,' it reads. 'Let's toast each and every fucker that made me this way,' the song invites. Soon there's a simulated dating app projected on the screen starring inflatable tube men and real ones on stage; Taylor and her performers bend them over to make a wind machine for her hair. It's a laugh – clever and apt. But far more affecting is Taylor's heartfelt speech afterwards about keeping going, keeping trying and not struggling alone. 'We have to do it together, I think,' she says.
Telegraph
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Self Esteem: The pop star's theatrical extravaganza proves she's worth the hype
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.
