Cover Feature Self Esteem: Bow Down Bitches

It feels delightfully on brand that Rebecca Lucy Taylor has chosen Margate’s Dalby Cafe as the location for the first in-depth interview around ‘Prioritise Pleasure’: her just-announced, increasingly-anticipated second album as Self Esteem, due for release in October.

This is, she tells us as a team of hair and make-up artists transform her into a Marie Antoinette-meets-Madonna fantasy during the accompanying photoshoot, her inaugural graduation to the status of magazine cover girl (aside from one time the Sheffield Big Issue used her phone selfie as a last-minute option). Another notable moment in a series of many since the release of April’s game-changing single ‘I Do This All The Time’ (a BBC 6 Music A-list playlisting; a long sought-after appearance on Later… with Jools Holland; airtime on BBC Radio 1), the significance is not lost on the singer. Now 34, Taylor has been in the industry for almost half her life - first as part of folk duo Slow Club for just over a decade, and then under her current moniker since Self Esteem’s debut single ‘Your Wife’ back in 2017. Only now are things all finally lining up, at long last.

And so, of course, for this milestone moment, we’re sat in the place where Pete Doherty famously noshed down a mega-breakfast in less than 20 minutes to mark the occasion. It’s brilliantly ridiculous, but also… kind of perfect?

“If all this had happened at 25, I wouldn’t be eating a fucking big breakfast, I’d be starving myself like a crazy nervous shrew. But now I’m 34 and I don’t give a shit,” she grins, veggie sausage stuck on the end of a fork. “Looking back, I feel really sorry for that person who couldn’t be herself anywhere because she felt like it was too much, when I really wasn’t doing that much at all. I feel really sorry for her. But I also think everything does happen when it’s meant to. It doesn’t faze me now. I’m so ready.”