Self Esteem is Rebecca Lucy Taylor, previously one half of indie folk pop duo Slow Club. With her new album Compliments Please her voice, once tender and diminutive has, since splitting from the band, been let loose to form a full on pop battle weapon. It’s an album with dozens of tricks up its sleeves, complete with some brilliantly funny neck twisting movements and a healthy dash of ‘piss off and annoy somebody else’.
“I’M STILL LAYING IN BED I’VE BEEN DOING A LOT OF GIGS AND A LOT OF PROMO. I’M JUST, TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT!” It’s been going pretty well for you, you must be delighted with the album’s reception? Yeah, it’s been amazing and a bit overwhelming and also, I keep feeling like I also want to be going like ‘I told you so!’. I’m surprised but also not surprised as I knew it was great. The songs on the album, have they been written recently or is it material you’ve been writing over the years and come back to? Yeah I’ve been ready to do this for quite a while. In a way to check I wasn’t going crazy and I’m sorta sick of this kind of feeling of people saying that ‘you should be bigger’ or ‘more people should know who you are’ or stuff like that. It’s not that I want fame but I just want some sort of growth. I sort of realise how unhappy I was before by how happy I am now. Generally in my life I feel…. good...excited. There are a lot of tracks on the album, is this something you set out to do at the
start or was this because there was so much material and you couldn’t bear to lose it? Yeah, I think I’m quite lazy so if I’ve taken the time to do something then I will make sure it gets used. I can’t let go of anything. Everything that doesn’t make it in, I repurpose somewhere else as I can’t start from scratch again. So it’s a bit of that. Also I wanted to make everything to do with this sort of over-the-top and grand. The fact that it’s too long feeds into this as well. In my mind it made sense that it would epic. You’re obviously having fun in your videos as well, that definitely comes across Yeah I love it, I love making videos. It was always quite a difficult thing to do in the band as I wanted to do a lot more and express a lot more. But you just can’t make people do things you know so now I get to do what I feel I want to. The choreography in the video for The Best, is that something that comes naturally to you? Yes I always wanted to dance a lot more than I did in the band and it was something I did all