The Last Dinner Party at Brixton Academy: If you’re still a cynic, you’ve never seen them live
“How was it?” – When it comes to The Last Dinner Party, that’s a stupid question. The band’s performance was outstanding, and they always have been.
Still, to this day, you hear a lot of shit spoken about The Last Dinner Party. Most people in Britain have a sixth sense for class divides, so surely it came as a surprise to nobody that she grew up in a private school. But the news arrived as a bomb, first exploding across comment sections, then finding its way itno ammunition stores as the perfect way to tear down the all-female five-piece.
People hate a fast riser, and we get a new example constantly. Only recently, I sat with Luvcat, the newest hypersonic success story, and she spoke about how certain people from her old South London gig crowd couldn’t be more desperate to begrudge and belittle her success. But it’s the same story. If someone were to ask me how a Luvcat gig was, the answer would obviously and every time be, “great”.
In that conversation with Luvcat, I told her a theory. I think some men in music see success as a queue. The theory rests on the premise that some people believe you pay your dues and you shuffle up, waiting patiently and quietly to get your shot. And, to many people, that’s how it should always work, regardless of the situation. The ‘regardless’ includes talent and effort and, most importantly, sheer star power.
Many people ignore that, it’s all simple in the hours. So when they see a woman ‘cut the queue’, they rage, ignoring the hours they put in to bypass the queue, lambasting the new star for playing a ‘few gigs’ and getting to the head of the line, without much thought for whether there needs to be a queue at all. Can’t the music industry be more like your local boozer, and the one who gets their pint first is the one who catches the eye of the one pulling the pints.
The Last Dinner Party story is more personal for me. The arc most people face when confronting a privately educated harmony-forward rock band, I experienced myself as I saw the band play at George Tavern when their record label put on a party celebrating the fact that they’d signed the band after a bidding war. I went along trying to be cynical, and it melted within one note.
Captivated by the band in one single show, I became a convert. Never has a band seemed so obviously destined for success, and in the years since, I’ve taken friends along and seen them be converted too: performing indie-rock baptisms at Glastonbury 2023, an uber-packed out Great Escape set, delivering rites for old bosses, boyfriends and acquaintances.
If you can get a person to drop their moaning and actually properly listen, you’ll likely convert them. But if you can get them to a gig, you definitely will.
On their second album, it’s as if the band realised that too. From The Pyre is built to be performed live, not just because songs like ‘The Scythe’ and ‘Second Best’ are foolproof crowd pleasers, or ‘This Is The Killer Speaking’ feels like an indie pantomime built for audience participation. But on that album, they seem to realise that their secret weapon is the band they create when unified.
Morris’ stage presence, Emily Robert’s shredding, Aurora Nishevci’s folk hypnotism, Lizzie Mayland’s vocals and Georgia Davies, holding it all together on bass in a way that your eyes can’t help but glide to. On this new album, each member gets their moment, and on the stage design on this tour, with a platform at the back, they each take that turn while the crowd and the rest of the band worship them.
Here on the second night of their sold-out run at Brixton Academy, an over 4900 person capacity venue, it’s a blessing to think of the small-cap shows they played only a few years before. But while being wistful can be fun, the truth is, they aren’t an underdog story, pluckily making their way to the top, scrapping for every morsel of attention. Even standing in a sweaty pub watching the band ply their newly found trade, it was clear they were destined for arena stardom and beyond. And if you’re still dubious of that, you probably haven’t seen them live.
