“Do you feel happy?” Rebecca Lucy Taylor looks at me over her beer, leaning back in her chair. I pause for a moment, unused to the inversion. Plus, she has just told me, rather insouciantly, that she is not.
“I don’t feel sad, though,” she adds with a shrug. “I feel alright, and I think that’s a good go at it for now. There are definitely moments of joy where there never were before. But they only happen when I’m being truthful with myself. Usually like, picking the dog’s shit up. That’s heaven.”
It’s the kind of throwaway remark that sums Rebecca up perfectly – a trademark blend of blunt honesty and black humour that has made her one of the music industry’s most compelling voices. Better known by her stage name Self Esteem, the singer has built a cult following by doing what a lot of pop stars don’t: telling the truth, unvarnished.
At Thursday's roundtable, Cat told Stephen Fry her ADHD and autism meant she found being around people all the time “exhausting”.
I meet her in the back room of a north London pub, the day before her 39th birthday. She sips her drink, half-laughing about the “existential dread” that comes with ageing in pop. “I think I’m just experiencing a normal weird reaction to leaving your 30s,” she says. “Plus, trying to be a pop star at 39 is kind of hard.”
We have met to discuss her debut book, A Complicated Woman. Earlier this year, she released her third studio album of the same name, and the book feels like a continuation of the candour found in the record – an equal parts self-lacerating, tender and witty account of sex, feminism and mental health.
Like the woman herself, A Complicated Woman refuses categorisation. Neither a memoir nor a novel, it is a fragmentary collage of dated diary entries, essays, anecdotes and industry autopsies that feels both mimetic of modern womanhood and singular to her. Stream-of-consciousness aphorisms like “Shaved my pussy and I still weigh the same,” “Be a very nice girl and shut up and act like you were born lovely,” and “I wish I understood anything,” thread throughout.
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Before she was an author, though, Rebecca was one of British pop’s most hard-won success stories. A Rotherham native, she spent over a decade slogging it out in indie band Slow Club before reinventing herself as Self Esteem – a project that fused thunderous, choir-backed pop with confession and feminist rage. Her propulsive 2021 sophomore album Prioritise Pleasure earned effusive praise, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and gave her the kind of cultural moment most artists only dream of.
“Everyone thought I’d done it. I thought I had too,” she admits. “My career wish list was basically to be on Jools Holland, be nominated for a Mercury Prize, and not have to live in a flat share. I achieved all that very suddenly. So it was like, what’s the next goal? Break America?”
A new kind of pressure emerged: to replicate the magic and justify the hype. Rebecca began working on her third album. And then came the comedown – hence, her admission of a hum of dissatisfaction that she can’t seem to shake.
“It felt like, either sell your soul or flop. I knew I wasn’t going to be Dua Lipa or Charli [XCX]. There was no blueprint for what I'm doing. And that’s why Complicated Woman is such a weird album. It’s a mix of me trying to make it global and also trying to be as weird as possible.”
She demurs. “I’ve felt very low for parts of this year because there were a couple of songs on the album where I was like, ‘there’s your fucking Radio One song,’ you know? And I didn’t love doing that. It also didn’t work – I’ve not had the global hit. And I also got canned by a couple of journalists. So it was actually lose-lose.”
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Does she read reviews of her albums? “There’s a Pitchfork one which is apparently really mean that I still haven’t read — everyone told me not to.”
Her album did earn some particularly high-profile praise, though. Earlier this year, Madonna was spotted in the stalls at one of Rebecca's shows debuting the record at the Duke of York’s Theatre, and later took to Instagram to call her an “incredible artist.” She was floored.
“She’s the reason for all of it, she’s why Self Esteem exists,” she says, eyes widening even now. “It was one of those moments where I was like, ‘I don’t need anything more.’ She still likes some of my Instagram posts now. Her even knowing I exist is quite nice.”
Rebecca's honesty about success feels particularly poignant in a moment when women in pop are dominating in an almost unprecedented fashion. She’s admitted to unfollowing other artists on Instagram in the past to protect her mental health. That comparison is a thread that runs throughout the book too – she jokes that, were she to go missing, “As long as Dua Lipa, Rita Ora, Florence and the Machine or Laura Marling aren’t missing that month, I would make the homepage for sure.”
“Any woman getting successful makes me really happy,” she tells me. “But then the other half of me goes, oh well, fuck. Why is that not me?”
She smiles, acknowledging the taboo, and dives headlong into it. “Brat in particular really torpedoed me,” she says. “I’m a massive fan of it, but it became this paramount edgy pop thing that I felt like I had to meet, and it fucked me up. I was writing an album about just trying to be okay. It couldn’t have been further from that energy.”
In the book, she also writes with the same brutal clarity about the aesthetic pressure that clings to women in the industry, particularly when it comes to weight. “Losing weight is always on my to-do list,” she says. She’s candid about the contradiction — the feminist who still sometimes wants to be thin. “I don’t know if that’ll change in my lifetime.”
I wonder how this new era of Ozempic-fuelled thinness has affected her. Does she feel any pressure to jump on the bandwagon? She pauses. “Honestly, the part of me that would get a kick out of being really skinny is like, fuck, maybe. But I know that would be ridiculous.”
For all her success, Rebecca feels like she occupies a grey area when it comes to her level of celebrity. “I’m not famous,” she says matter-of-factly. “I can buy a flat now, I’m not living off Uncle Ben’s rice anymore, which is huge, especially when you don’t have parents who can just give you money,” she says (having just regaled me with an anecdote about eating so much microwave rice in a previous flat share that she gave herself a two-year-long allergy).
“I’ve done a few interviews where they're like, ‘Oh, you're rich and famous now. What’s it like not being able to go to Tesco?’ And I’m like, ‘I go to fucking Tesco!’
“And it’s not that I want to be famous,” she continues. “But I’m a bit of an anomaly in the industry. My Spotify streams and followers are very low, considering the tickets I sell. And I don’t know why that is.”
Her frankness about money and class – still rare in pop – is part of what makes her so refreshing. Rebecca has spoken often (with wit) about her working-class roots and the fact that her career has been built entirely on graft. If art is the fulcrum on which her life balances, financial precarity remains the shadow that refuses to fade.
Her humour often conceals deeper wounds, though. In her book, she writes about a relationship with a 25-year-old man who she met when she was 14, appearing together in an amateur production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. “He told me when I turned 16 we could start going out,” she writes. “He kissed me. It changed the course of my life.”
When I gently ask her about the incident, she is remarkably generous. “I hope it doesn’t come across as me saying, ‘You traumatised me,’” she says. “It’s more that that was my introduction to romance, and no wonder my twenties were a revenge movie of anger. I should’ve been left alone for a lot longer than I was.”
She also writes briefly about experiencing sexual assault, and the long shadow of it. “The only justice I can do is to acknowledge it and make art from it,” she says. “You can’t rely on the system. It’s relentlessly hopeless, and it’s getting worse. So you turn it into something.”
When conversation turns to her love life, her tone lightens. For the last two years, Rebecca, who is openly bisexual, has been dating a man she refers to rather chicly as “my current male lover.” “We met when I was in Cabaret,” she says. “He was the Nazi – so basic. But he’s lovely. And it’s just carried on being nice.”
It leads us neatly to the topic she’s never shied away from: motherhood. “Freezing my eggs was the most expensive thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “It was hard and horrible, but at least I’ve done something. I just want ten more years, then maybe I’ll want a baby.”
She laughs. “Something has definitely shifted – I look at my dog and I feel fucking mental with love. Maybe that’s maternal. Maybe it’s just the dog.”
So, what’s next for the woman who is already the ultimate multi-hyphenate? This month, she is curating the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre. Of course, there will be new music, and she half-jokes that perhaps she’ll foray into ceramics.
“I don’t think I can suddenly have a global hit,” she admits. “Once upon a time, I was like, I’m gonna be a huge, global artist, and now I’m like, I’m gonna keep making music to keep that roof over my head.”
She drains the last of her beer and stands up to leave. “Honestly, my whole career has been such a fucking ballache – just so hard to get anywhere, so hard to make money. I do wonder about what my art would look like without that pressure.” Then, wryly: “But then, maybe I wouldn’t make anything at all.”
A Complicated Woman is on sale from Thursday 30 October.
