Rebecca Lucy Taylor spent six months, not very long ago, playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre just off Trafalgar Square; the lead role in a musical about a time that once again might not be very far away from now. She stands and watches blunt dogmatic medieval bullshit slowly immerse humanity to the point of suffocation but Self Esteem isn't even an anagram of Sally Bowles. She's going to punish your bodies until you believe in her soul, or at least give her a chance to let us know what's in it.
The Mercury Music Prize isn't yet due for a few months but I would like to see the third Self Esteem album bite at it. A Complicated Woman is an extraordinary and righfully angry song cycle (in the way that Sgt Pepper and What's Going On weren't really song cycles). It begins like Sinéad O'Connor - oh, so much of Sinéad's spirit burns through this recital - hijacking an Enya session then plays as though the last quarter-century of pop has been rewired through Taylor's mind, flashing before her eyes and all craving improvement. Cleverly there are elements of both the Polyphonic Spree (the choirs awarding Heaven back to its rightful owners) and St Vincent, of Little Mix, Atomic Kitten and what Girls Aloud could have been, in fact what all those girls could have been if men hadn't told them what not to be in the first place.
Of course there are also elements of brat ("Mother," "The Curse") and more than a nod to Jade Thirlwall; both "Focus Is Power" and "The Deep Blue Okay" point to a slightly older and wiser pop exploitée. Over and over we hear what might be damnations of lovers ("Logic, Bitch!," complete with a hilarious yet frightening coda from Sue Tompkins, the lead singer of that other lost early noughties compass to the pop yet to happen, Life Without Buildings) or drink ("The Demon") but on closer examination tend more to be about Ms Taylor herself, or the image that The Poisoned Industry would prefer her to assume.
A Complicated Woman says enough is fucking enough. In the showstopping Nadine Shah duet "Lies" - Taylor, Thirlwall, Shah, it's far from grim up North - both singers nail the lie of pop patriarchy with formidable aplomb. "One step forward, ten steps back - and I'm to be grateful for that?" Enough of the inching compromises, of crying on ceaseless trains, of singing a third above or playing drums because that's allegedly cool. The Moonchild Sanelly duet "In Plain Sight" climaxes with them screaming "WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT FROM ME?" (see also the "HEY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?" of St Vincent's "Broken Man"). No more nice dinner manners for grannies in Arbroath or Which-Was-Nice dinner party pudding-bowl jerks who'd secretly and smilingly shove you back down to the laundry basement.
She says it in "Mother" - "I recommend listening." She reiterates it later in the same song: "I don't need solutions, I just want to be heard." By the time of "Lies" the reserve of patience has run out: "I'll push through the fatigue...and make you fucking hear me."
Self Esteem doesn't care what you think, but cares very deeply about your acknowledging her right to think. And there is also redemption. "Turn into something new," Tompkins cheerly advises Taylor at the end of "Logic, Bitch!" "If Not Now, It's Soon" is a very moving reassurance that happiness and fulfilment will find us all in the end - far more affecting than the facile Play-Doh fortune cookie wellness homilies that recent pop has made only too familiar. Even at the record's beginning, Taylor admits hope - "Focus Is Power" was composed during the pandemic, the torn era that compelled us to rethink our entire reasons for being, and if you're not moved by "I deserve to be here/And every time I fall/I crawl back like an animal/My focus is powerful" (see inter alia "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba and "Happiness Is Just Around The Bend" by Brian Auger) then not even a gigantic bulldozer is likely to move you.
What does Self Esteem want you to hear? She knows what she doesn't want, what she really, really doesn't want - the priapic banger "69" - and as she nears the horizon of transcendence in the record's closing two songs, she knows that what she's reaching isn't perfect (tell me, Ms Thunberg, what is) but, as with Number 6 in the Lotus at the end of "Fall Out," closing the loop, is sorely aware that she's going to have to fight this battle over and over, chapter by chapter of her life, but really is fine with that. Her closing thought? "I guess I've got something."
A Complicated Woman is loudly and artily theatrical and of course I am fine with that, as should you be. Why murmur when you can shout? Why permit music critics to confine female artists to the kennels of despondency and damage (what good is sitting alone in your room)? If you're not going to say everything within the span of your allotted life then WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO SAY IT? In a lot of ways the record answers a lot of the questions posed by the various decrepit characters chronicled in The New Sound; Greep's protagonists, all specimens of impaled toxic masculinity, all perish at the font of perverse and unfulfillable dreams of what they imagine women are like. Taylor yells back, well this is the shit we have to deal with every second of our fucking imperfect lives! In "Mother" she seems to address the speaker of "Holy, Holy" directly - "I am not your therapist/You don't pay me enough for this" ("And I want you to look at me as if you're lost - HOW MUCH WILL THAT COST??").
Both records are hugely catchy and pretentious - and these are among the highest of compliments I can offer. The more pretentiousness, the better, since that is, by definition, what art is about. Both are exceptionally worthy of winning the Mercury, though of course that will not happen since acceptance depends on how playable they are in the reductive and pandering petrified doxa of daytime BBC 6 Music. But A Complicated Woman is spectacularly and proudly brilliant. It's the album Geri Halliwell should have been allowed, or should have allowed herself, to make.
"Oh God, how depressing! You're meant to think I'm an international woman of mystery. I'm working on it like mad."
(Sally Bowles to Brian Roberts, Cabaret)
"Men are fucking terrified that whatever they say, I’ll have a problem with — but that’s because they’re not listening. I’m not intimidating at all. It’s just that I’m not submissive.”
(Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Evening Standard interview, 9 November 2023)
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