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Hard-edged digital club music throbs from the theatre stage – a place mostly in darkness, its shadows hiding a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist. Standing in a row, glaring at the theatre audience, are Self Esteem and 10 dancers. They are not dancing. It’s a tense, delicious contradiction. The company stand stock-still for what feels like ages, clad in bonnets, collars and black gowns – half convent, half Gilead.
When they do move, it’s just their heads at first, glaring accusatively at one spotlit audience member. Gradually, these halting and jerky gestures become spasms, which become seizures, until finally the tension is released into something akin to dancing.
The propulsive music, meanwhile, comes from one of the best tracks from Self Esteem’s brand new album, A Complicated Woman, released next week. Mother finds Rebecca Lucy Taylor telling a lover how she is not there to parent them. “Work on your own shit,” she sneers. Taylor’s forthrightness is made up of equal parts fed-up, straight-talking northerner and arts-leaning OnlyFans dominatrix. “Are you interested in growing?” she demands witheringly. “There is other literature outside of The Catcher in the Rye.” While it’s very much a banger from the present, there are hints here of Underworld and of Peaches – the grand dame of 00s underground sex-positive club music, whose work was full of hard emotional reckonings.
This five-night theatrical presentation of Self Esteem’s new album is very much an ensemble piece in which group singing and moving as a mass are as important as the singular pop star at the front. Taylor cites David Byrne’s American Utopia tour as a source, but there’s a lot of Mitski in here too. The performers move like a murmuration of starlings around Taylor.
Lies – a new song about the falsehoods we tell others to make them comfortable and how we believe them ourselves because it’s easier – plays out as a seated circle, with the lights revealing the foreboding Club Gilead space around the performers to be a well-used community hall; piled-up benches, visible backstage clutter. The climax of the first act, however, finds the performers cavorting in a tableau of simulated carnality; Hieronymus Bosch via High School Musical. Later, everyone will be in football kits, doing lunges to 69, a song about sexual positions.
And we’re back! Taylor’s last album, 2021’s unmissable Prioritise Pleasure, perfectly bottled a set of feelings about her life and times that pointed up the ferocious contradictions of contemporary womanhood, queer and straight. It resonated hard, catapulting Self Esteem from cult act to flavour of the moment as the post-pandemic era prompted many into similar recalibrations. Stop people-pleasing, FFS, was the album’s overarching message to all comers; please yourself.
When the album’s cycle reached its end, Taylor took on other work, most notably a role in Cabaret. She credits that experience with teaching her a degree of self-care; another way of making art that could be less gruelling than the indie rock method. Taylor spent many years in a band, Slow Club, before being reborn as DIY pop maximalist; she ran herself into the ground touring Prioritise Pleasure, anyway.
Hence this show, which will – Self Esteem has hinted elsewhere – be followed by a more conventional tour. It starts off sublime; an unexpected highlight (if that’s the right word) is a projected image of the South African polymath Moonchild Sanelly, a guest on the album, weeping silently circa In Plain Sight. “What the fuck you want from me?” Sanelly cries, in playback, and the choir swell to join her.
Gradually, the show becomes less like an artistic statement about the threat to women’s autonomy and the complexities of getting what you want and still having to work on your own shit regardless, and more like a gig. Last album hits such as Wizardry and I Do This All the Time punctuate the run of new songs: a reasonable tactic that gets people up and out of their seats. It really is great to hear them again, in the company of others, but it still feels like a slight dilution of Taylor’s stark vision tonight.
Self Esteem’s fans love her for many reasons. One is Taylor’s sense of humour – or more specifically, her compulsion to puncture pomposity with a wink. Many will feel that this evening’s triumphant return hits a crescendo around the perky dance pop of Cheers to Me, with a message in hot pink projected on a screen: “Please do the dance on TikTok I want to buy Janet and Andy a caravan,” it reads.
“Let’s toast each and every fucker that made me this way,” the song invites. Soon there’s a simulated dating app projected on the screen starring inflatable tube men and real ones on stage; Taylor and her performers bend them over to make a wind machine for her hair. It’s a laugh – clever and apt. But far more affecting is Taylor’s heartfelt speech afterwards about keeping going, keeping trying and not struggling alone. “We have to do it together, I think,” she says.
