The 6 Music dads are out tonight. The occasional navy T-shirt amidst a sea of sequinned kimonos and ASOS playsuits — there’s an apologetic air to these men, a quickness to utter a “sorry, I’m so sorry” lest you walk past them, or even so much as glance in their direction. They’re aware of their intrusion here, at this Self Esteem concert. That is: this commune for neurotic women with balayage; this travelling community centre for the girls, gays, and theys.
It’s here that the complexity of Self Esteem, Rotherham pop star and Guardian darling, is best captured: following her stratospherically well-received second album Prioritise Pleasure (2021), the artist (real name Rebecca Lucy Taylor) has gone on to achieve British establishment-approved success few 38-year-old female pop artists could ever dream of. She’s been nominated for the Mercury Prize, she’s starred in Cabaret on the West End, and she’s been on Richard Osman’s House of Games. All this, whilst releasing songs as weird and subversive as ’69’ (subject matter exactly what it sounds like). Thus, it is a complicated demographic Self Esteem has captured, hence the audience at the Usher Hall tonight, hence A Complicated Woman (2025): the name of her third album and the tour bringing her to Edinburgh.
The show itself begins with several figures taking to the stage in a row, silent and stiff — Self Esteem and her ensemble, all dressed in a black-and-white Handmaid’s Tale get up. They glare out at the audience, underneath their bonnets, before launching into album opener ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’. It’s a track that PERFECTLY encapsulates all the Self Esteem musical signatures: the gospel-esque chanting of the title, the Yorkshire-accented spoken word of the verses, the beautifully belted and emotionally raw bridge (“If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward?”).
Then, ability to move rediscovered, Taylor and her backup singers propel into ‘Mother’, a less platitude-heavy but even more laugh-heavy club anthem: “Are you interested in growing? There is other literature outside of Catcher in the Rye.”
Watching Taylor perform live is to be hit with this strange and overwhelming desire to quote her own lyrics back at her, like you would with a comedian’s most famous bit or a church’s most sacred prayer: she balances unbearable earnestness and intense funniness with such knife-edge precision, it’s never clear whether you’re meant to be laughing or crying. But laugh and cry you shall! As she sings in ‘Fucking Wizardry’ (maybe the best-named Self Esteem song), “part of being funny is having some sincerity”, and Taylor has both in spades.
“My name is Self Esteem, and for the next 69 minutes, your arse is MINE”, she shouts after… “69”… a knowing reference to Robbie Williams’ legendary 2003 Knebworth performance (IYKYK) — and for the next 69 minutes, we are completely and utterly HERS. Taylor is an incredibly compelling performer, with a powerful and beautiful voice: it’s so loud and so clear and so well-suited to the emotional magnitude of her discography. There really are no moments of half-arsedness, it is a full force vocal tour-de-force from start to finish.
‘Cheers to Me’ is perhaps the energy apex of the night’s performance: a self-congratulatory break-up banger during which inflatable tube men take to the stage, flailing about under the disco lights and pumping rhythm. “How many trains can I cry on in a lifetime?”, she sings joyfully, flanked by her ultra high energy dancers as they jump up and down and pump their fists all around her, all ablaze with a mix of rage and happiness.
The show winds down with Self Esteem’s magnum opus, Prioritise Pleasure’s ‘I Do This All The Time’, the kind of track that (as any Radio 6 music host will tell you) only comes around a few times a lifetime, or something like that. It’s a deeply arresting spoken word piece, 5 minutes of rumination and over-thinking and self-flagellation set to music: a perfectly zeitgeist-capturing time capsule of 2021, the soundtrack to a thousand individuals thousand individual moments of reflection. “Old habits die for a couple of weeks and then I start doing them again” Taylor begins, and the audience knows where to take it from there.
Image Credit to Tamsin Dunlop.