The director that inspired The Last Dinner party’s new album: “He’s number one”
In the modern landscape of 21st century England, I often wonder how we are viewed by the rest of the world?
At one point, it was descendants of an all-encompassing royalty that made us perennial bone-china tea drinkers, who speak exclusively in the Shakespearean language. More recently, though, the world has embraced our street culture. Football hooliganism has replaced crumpet eating and we are seen as the ultimate purveyors of street wise grit.
See Charli XCX’s global domination as an example, taking the cold streets of East London and planting them onto the rest of the world. That now, is England.
But The Last Dinner Party’s most recent album, From The Pyre has perhaps brought the soundtrack to which we can shut the door on that chapter, and move forward into something more different. Something that embraces tradition, in a futuristic and paradoxical way.
Because through the band’s aesthetic and sonic concepts, they are wholly embracing history. The renaissance and baroque eras are celebrated in their styling, while Abigail Morris celebrates at the front of the band with a refreshing sense of liberal acceptance. They are bending traditional iconography to make important statements for a bright, accepting future.
But at the very core of this artistic direction, is a questioning of what England is, and how it is portrayed. More specifically, through the work of one director.
Morris explained “Peter Greenaway I think, one of the main directors who’s influenced us visually. He’s an English director. He did a load of films throughout the mid-80s to late-80s, and he’s got such an incredible visual language.”
She continued, “Drowning By Numbers, I think, was a big influence for this album for us. When we were finishing the album, we were talking about the cover and the music videos. we were thinking about how it’s maybe different or evolved from the first record and we kept saying this is an outside album and I don’t know why it just feels very outdoors and of nature I think specifically in English nature because we wrote it in London and in England. With some of Peter Greenaway’s films, he has a really beautiful way of shooting nature and people and characters that is really distinctly English.”
There is something almost hypnotic and mystic about The Last Dinner Party’s artistic direction on this latest album, that wholeheartedly embraces the emotion and heaviness of those styles, while also being satirical with it. Songs like ‘Second Best’ and ‘This Is The Killer Speaking’ still exist just fine in that traditional landscape they’ve built, whilst looking at you with a mischievous grin. Which again, is something they have picked up from Greenaway.
“I don’t know how else to describe it, but it’s this really kind of interesting, romantic, but also really wry and kind of cheeky and kind of not taking itself too seriously, but also incredibly romantic” Morris explains about Greenaway’s style. “And I feel like that felt like a thread thematically and visually for the record. So he’s number one.”
