A few years ago, long-time indie staples Slow Club went out quietly. The process was documented in a road film, Our Most Brilliant Friends, that followed them on tour for their final album; it’s hardcore-fans-only stuff, but might one day take on a renewed importance, capturing as it does the sowing of the Self Esteem seeds.
Rebecca Taylor, one half of the band, was sick of it, not least because of what she perceived to be a lack of ambition; at one point in the film, she complains that she wants the group to be bigger - she wants to be on Later…with Jools Holland. Fast forward six years, and Taylor, via her reinvention as a solo artist, has appeared on Later…, and the Hootenanny, and Taskmaster, for that matter.
She’s been on the cover not just of the usual glut of music mags but also of Grazia; she’s done the rounds of the UK’s TV chat shows, too, as well as national radio, having appeared alongside Eddie Redmayne on Zoë Ball’s Radio 2 Breakfast Show last year. On social media, where she remains a wickedly funny presence, she refuses to let anybody forget that the Danish Girl star left with a vinyl copy of her second record, Prioritise Pleasure, under his arm.
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What we don’t know is whether he listened to it. If not, he is missing out sorely; it’s a modern pop masterpiece, a kaleidoscopic chronicle of modern womanhood that shifts musical register as often as it does thematic content.
Between Taylor’s rapier wit and razor-sharp ear for a hook, the album has sufficiently struck a chord to consign the basement venues Slow Club frequented to the past; tonight is the first of three sold-out nights at the 2300-capacity Albert Hall, and having adjusted and adapted her live show on the spin as her star rose over the past couple of years, it feels as if now is the victory lap - the chance to put Prioritise Pleasure over to audiences the way she’d always envisaged it in her head.
If you’re wondering what that looks like, it includes, but is not limited to, the following; costume changes, gimp suits, meticulous choreography, a rock-solid rhythm section, some of the most scathingly insightful lyricism of the past few years roared back by a capacity crowd, a Happy Valley-inspired interlude and, at the centre of it all, Taylor as the thing she’d always imagined herself as - the consummate pop star.
And she’s a contemporary one, too, understanding of the fact that the listening public’s tastes are ever more stylistically divergent; it’s soaring hooks and harmonies one minute, on ‘Fucking Wizardry’ or ‘Girl Crush’, and genuine subversion the next - see the feral ‘How Can I Help You’, or her ingenious mission statement, ‘I Do This All the Time’.
Throughout, she’s flanked by three dancers who defy the term ‘backing’ by positioning themselves at the core of the show; accordingly, this feels like the precise kind of glittering spectacle that Taylor had always had in mind for Self Esteem, even when she was working her way back up through the ranks with her first album, Compliments Please.
That record is sparingly represented tonight, but ‘The Best’ does make an appearance as part of a richly-deserved encore; it’s appropriately titled, her best track, the kind of irresistible earworm that any A-list pop mainstay would kill for.
For another artist to sing these songs, though, would be to defeat their purpose; they speak to Taylor’s frustration with, and fearless navigation of, a world that had incessantly told her that there isn’t room for a project like Self Esteem - that people don’t want to hear songs that are honest about the realties of being a woman in her thirties, or that her melodies might be better delivered by somebody who better fits the corporate image of what a pop singer should look like.
This sold-out tour, which has shifted nearly 44,000 tickets nationwide, resoundingly says otherwise; the show at the centre of it is a testament to the power of pop defiance, but also a wonderful vindication of Taylor’s desire for more than her old life was offering her. She wanted pop stardom - now she’s earned it.
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