awarded The Sunday Times Culture’s
record of the year last year, was named
BBC Music’s Introducing Artist of 2021
and is up for best new artist at the Brits
this week. Her personal appeal is potent
— an irresistible combination of camp
glamour and everywoman likeability.
She wears power suits and leopard print
at her gigs, but she also wore a dress
made entirely of Boots Advantage cards
for her performance at Glastonbury
in 2019. She supports Sheffield
Wednesday. She goes on podcasts about
pubs to enthuse about her favourite pint (Foster’s) and
pop culture podcasts to analyse RuPaul’s Drag Race with
academic authority. She is, indisputably, the woman
you’d want to be your best mate.
We meet on a Friday evening at a London whisky bar
and she arrives from the photoshoot in her own clothes —
a bombshell in high-waisted blue denim jeans and
matching jacket — and with her sleepy Monroe eyes, the
cheekbones of Diana Dors and the mouth of a gobby
friend who gets you thrown out of the club queue.
“Look!” she shouts, sticking her hand out to show me
her long, fake red nails from the shoot, one of which has
already fallen off. “It looks like I’ve had a finger up my arse.
Why did I get a brown shellac!?” We order whisky and she
tells me that she’s well aware of her particular brand of
relatability. “I think the sort of ‘I could be your mate
down the pub’-ness of me is just a way to handle loads
of compliments,” she observes. “It’s a coping mecha-
nism or a safety net or something.”
In her music and in interviews she often speaks
of her persistent anxieties about keeping
everyone happy other than herself. Celebrity is,
surely, a gruelling form of immersion therapy to
erase chronic people-pleasing. Now with
44,000-plus followers on Instagram, how has
she coped with knowing that there are people
she doesn’t know who have an opinion about
her? “Not very well,” she says. “Although I’ve
been so lucky. So far everything has been very
positive. Even online, it’s all positive, apart from
men.” Men, she says, have always been confused
by her, which has been made all the more apparent
by how some have reacted to her work. Some send
messages or write comments on her posts calling
her a “slag” and asking what she thinks she’s doing
for feminism (“You’re proving my point, my
friend,” she deadpans). Others reluctantly say theyenjoy her work, with the patronising
caveat that they don’t think they’re the
target market.
She often talks about the Trojan horse
strategy she has taken with her music —
packaging herself up with gloss and
glamour to deliver a feminist message
furtively. In her video for How Can I Help
Yo u she plays the drums in a black bra
and shorts, while roaring lyrics about
female subservience: “I did that video
because the men who want to click on it
for my jiggling boobs won’t like what I’m
saying, but they’ll have to hear it if they want to look at my
boobs.” She tells me that it feels like “the biggest win”
when she gets DMs from men who tell her that her lyrics
have made them think about how they treat women, but
she never wants to chastise them. “Men are really scared
of me,” she sighs. “I don’t want that. I don’t hate men at all
— I fancy loads of them. It has been weird. It’s still weird.
I don’t know. Men are really frightened of me.”
The culprit for their fear, she thinks, is her message of
female nonconformance. We’re on our second whisky
when we get into the same conversation I have with
nearly every thirtysomething friend over and over again
at the moment: the question of whether to have children
and why we have children. “Whether I do want kids or I
don’t want kids, I don’t want it to be a decision my body
is making for me before I can,” she says. “That’s not
fair, my career is only just starting.” Fairness is a
word she brings up repeatedly in relation to female
biology, and the lack of it obviously frustrates her.
“I feel like we’ve been given this task to do. But
life isn’t long enough, in my opinion. It doesn’t
feel fair that I’ve got a finite amount of time to
decide to do this thing.” She identifies as
pansexual (attracted to people regardless of
their sex or gender identity) and her longest
relationship was with a woman. “I made my
peace a long time ago with the idea of having a
baby and science being involved. So that was
kind of great,” she says, before uttering the
sentence nearly every friend of mine without
children says: “It still hangs over me, though.”
Sexuality features heavily in her work — bold,
unashamed and gorgeously silly. She credits her
long relationship with a woman for helping her
realise what her “needs and wants” were: “I just
haven’t got time to not have great sex. When girls
are like, ‘Oh, I fake it,’ I’m like, ‘What? No way!’ ”From left Rebecca Lucy Taylor on stage with Slow Club in 2014; performing as Self Esteem last November‘I just haven’t
got time to not
have great sex.
When girls are
like, “Oh, I fake
it,” I’m like,
what? No way!’
Alexandra Cameron, Getty Images
The Sunday Times Style • 17