Self Esteem (Rebecca Lucy Taylor)

Rebecca Lucy Taylor (born 15 October 1986), also known professionally as Self Esteem, is an English musician and actress. First known as one half of the band Slow Club, she launched a solo career as Self Esteem with the single "Your Wife" in 2017, followed by the studio albums Compliments Please in 2019, Prioritise Pleasure in 2021 and A Complicated Woman in 2025. A multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, songwriter and theatre composer, she won the 2021 BBC Music Introducing Artist of the Year Award and achieved a nomination for the Mercury Prize in 2022 with Prioritise Pleasure. As an actress, Taylor has performed on stage and appeared in television series like I Hate Suzie and Smothered. From September 2023 to March 2024 she performed the lead role of Sally Bowles in the West End production of Cabaret, and is currently starring in the West End revival of Teeth 'n' Smiles. Taylor was born and grew up in Rotherham, England. Her father was a health and safety advisor and an amateur musician in a band, and her mother was a secretary. She attended Wales High School in Rotherham where she credits music teacher Antony Wright with teaching her to sing. Her main interests as a child were music, dance and cricket and she has described herself as a "choir nerd" while at school. Taylor was previously a member of folk duo Slow Club, which formed in Sheffield in 2006. The band consisted of multi-instrumentalists Charles Watson and Taylor, with Watson on the piano, Taylor on the drums, and both performing guitars and vocals. The band paused working in 2017, following an extensive tour to support their last album, owing to differing musical interests and Taylor feeling unfulfilled. Slow Club's final tour in the winter of 2016, and Taylor's dissatisfaction and unhappiness with the band, was captured in the documentary Our Most Brilliant Friends, directed by Piers Dennis and released in 2018. Taylor started posting art and short notes on Instagram under the name Self Esteem in 2015. Prior to releasing music under the name, she used Self Esteem for a range of artistic projects including an exhibition of paintings and prints, and short films. Speaking about her stage name, Taylor has said she decided on the name around six years before she started using it, and that "I wanted to call it Sex Appeal or Self Esteem ... 'cause band names are bad, like, there's no good ones. But I probably should have just called it Rebecca Lucy Taylor". A big fan of Queen, she based her logo on Freddie Mercury's signature. Taylor was inspired with the confidence to pursue a solo career after watching RuPaul's Drag Race – "that whole ethos of not being ashamed to be confident or brilliant". She credits Jamie T with encouraging her to release her music after she shared some of her early solo work with him; his 2016 album Trick ends with a track called "Self Esteem". Taylor released her first music under the Self Esteem moniker, the single "Your Wife", in September 2017, with "OMG" as a B-side. The track was released on Kick + Clap, a label run by Django Django member Dave MacLean. Her first live show as Self Esteem was in October 2017 at Margate Arts Club. Taylor went on to feature on the Django Django track "Surface to Air", which appeared on the band's 2018 album Marble Skies. Tracks for the Self Esteem debut album Compliments Please were recorded from January to September 2018, and Taylor signed a solo deal with Fiction Records in April 2018. During the period of recording she played live at Latitude, Tramlines and a sold out show at Omeara Theatre London, followed by an eight-show UK tour in autumn 2018. The first single "Wrestling" was released in July 2018 followed by "Rollout" in September 2018, "The Best" in January 2019 and "Girl Crush" in February 2019. Compliments Please was released on 1 March 2019 on Fiction Records. It was well received critically, with an average rating of 80/100 according to Metacritic. A deluxe version was released in October 2019 with an additional track "Rooms". In March 2019 Self Esteem completed an 11-date UK tour in support of the album release and played at UK festivals including Glastonbury, British Summer Time and Latitude. In December 2019 she released a standalone single, "All I Want for Christmas Is a Work Email", recorded at Abbey Road Studios. On 1 May 2020, Self Esteem released the Cuddles Please EP, with stripped down versions of tracks from Compliments Please – "Favourite Problem", "The Best" and "In Time" – along with a cover of "Miami Memory" by Alex Cameron. The EP features Neighbourhood Voices, a Sheffield-based upper voices choir. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 she organised an online all-female festival, Pxssy Pandemique, to raise money for Women's Aid. Much of the Self Esteem second album was written before the COVID-19 pandemic that caused intermittent public health restrictions in the UK from March 2020 onwards. These restrictions delayed its recording and release. The record was co-written, recorded and produced with Johan Hugo Karlberg, the producer who also worked on Compliments Please. The first single from the album, "I Do This All the Time" was released in April 2021. Largely spoken word, and consequently compared to Baz Luhrmann's "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", Taylor said that "I went into this studio in Sheffield just to experiment, and I ended up building the backing track up, and just reading out my iPhone notes in a row". The single was a huge critical and commercial success, and was praised by Tracey Thorn and by Jack Antonoff. It represented Taylor's first big music industry breakthrough. In a 2021 interview she said that she had previously lied about her age and said she was 25, and that it took her "a while to be proud" of breaking into the industry in her thirties. In July, she released the title track and announced that the record, Prioritise Pleasure, would coincide with a UK tour in October of the same year. In August, Self Esteem released the third single, "How Can I Help You". Taylor directed the music videos for those singles, filming all three at the Almeida Theatre. In September, the single "Moody" was released. The video for "Moody" was directed by Louise Bhose and features comedian Alistair Green alongside Taylor. In October, Self Esteem released "You Forever", the final single preceding the album. Prioritise Pleasure was released on 22 October 2021. The UK Self Esteem tour started on 6 November 2021 in Edinburgh. The Guardian, The Sunday Times and Gigwise ranked Prioritise Pleasure as the best album of 2021. NME ranked the album as the fourth best of 2021. The Guardian named "I Do This All The Time" as the best song of 2021. During 2022 Self Esteem played a sold-out Prioritise Pleasure tour and they also played 30 festivals. Taylor composed the soundtrack for the West End Production of Suzie Miller's play Prima Facie starring Jodie Comer, which was released on 14 June 2022. She described her connection with the production by saying the play "deals with similar issues" as Prioritise Pleasure, including heartbreak, sexism and misogyny. Prima Facie was awarded Best New Play at the 2023 Laurence Olivier Awards. In December 2022 she voiced the Christmas Campaign for Solace Women's Aid - 7 Years of Christmas. The campaign went on to win several awards and raise over 70,000 for the charity. The 2023 live tour in support of Prioritise Pleasure, the I Tour This All The Time tour, was announced in March 2022 and originally consisted of 11 dates. Due to popularity of ticket sales, another 10 dates were added to the final tour which sold out before it commenced in February 2023. The tour played to 43,000 people including three nights at London's Eventim Apollo, three nights at Manchester's Albert Hall, and two nights at Taylor's home town O2 Academy Sheffield. During the UK tour Self Esteem performed two new, unreleased songs – "Mother" and "Love Second Music First". Self Esteem played UK