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    ‘I’m addicted a bit to saying what I think’: Self Esteem and Lucy Prebble in conversation

    Oct 24, 2021 8 minutes

    The first time writer Lucy Prebble met singer-songwriter Rebecca Lucy Taylor, AKA Self Esteem, they both walked out of the West End play they had just been watching. “It wasn’t a bad play, we just wanted to talk to each other,” Prebble laughs as she recounts the story. “So if people leave my own plays from now on, I’m not going to assume that they hate it, I’m going to assume that life is more interesting.”

    That meeting was back in 2017, and since then the pair have discovered they have much in common: they both began their careers in Sheffield; they share a passion for the theatre – provided it holds their attention sufficiently – and they are both successful and uncompromising women in traditionally male-dominated creative industries.

    In the intervening years, Prebble – who won acclaim with her 2009 play Enron – has cemented her status as one of Britain’s foremost theatre and TV writers, collaborating with her friend Billie Piper for the second time, following 2007’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl, on the searing 2020 comedy-drama I Hate Suzie (she is currently writing a second series), and with Jesse Armstrong on the award-winning HBO drama Succession. Taylor, meanwhile, left her first band, the indie-folk duo Slow Club, to begin a solo career as Self Esteem, producing ambitious, experimental pop that has drawn comparisons with Fiona Apple.

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