Everybody wants a slice of The Last Dinner Party. Magnetic, mischievous, a bit mysterious, the all-woman London art-rockers have been named winners of this year’s Brit Award for Rising Star, an honour previously bestowed on Adele (whom they sound nothing like) and Florence and the Machine (a discernible influence). They’ve opened for the Rolling Stones in London. Lana Del Rey and the Crown star Emma Corrin are fans. As 2024 gets up and running, The Last Dinner Party could just be the hottest band on the planet.
“I’m overtired and slightly hungover,” Georgia Davies, the band’s bassist, says, smiling, as she contemplates the arrival of their long-awaited, blockbustingly melodramatic debut LP, Prelude to Ecstasy. “But I’ve used the metaphor of being a pirate aboard a ship on a stormy sea – trying to navigate with a compass and tools that I’m not necessarily familiar with into unfamiliar but also beautiful and terrifying terrain.”
“Beautiful and terrifying” is useful shorthand for The Last Dinner Party’s music. Their songs are a big, billowing blend of alternative pop, folk horror, fabulous frocks and lyrics that hit like Kate Bush brainstorming with Virginia Woolf. Consider their 2023 single My Lady of Mercy, which simultaneously evokes a beer-soaked indie disco, gloomy wanderings on 18th-century moors and Rose Glass’s nun-based 2019 horror flick Saint Maud. “Picture me in bed / Under your crucifix,” declaims Abigail Morris, the band’s lead singer, fighting through suffocating layers of religious imagery.
Similar sensibilities are conjured by Nothing Matters, the video to which finds The Last Dinner Party donning decadent dresses and dancing menacingly around a grand old pile, like Barry Keoghan at the end of Saltburn. That’s what The Last Dinner Party are going for, Davies says – “the stupid, exaggerated running around in big houses”.
As with Saltburn, The Last Dinner Party have attracted a great deal of attention – largely positive, some negative. Forming in 2019, when they were at university, and honing both their sound and aesthetic through the pandemic, they were the most talked about musicians in London by last summer. A few months later, word had gone international: Rolling Stone magazine feted the quintet as the band on everyone’s lips; in December, a late-night show in Dublin sold out in a heartbeat.
Expectations are high, then, going into Prelude to Ecstasy. They more than live up to the pressure: the album brims with vast, shutter-blowing choruses and exhilarating melodies. But the attention around the band has to do with more than just the music. Much of it is down to their knack for evocative presentation: at their debut gig, at the George Tavern in east London in 2021, they set themselves a dress code of “Princess Diana in an American Apparel advert”. Twelve months later, playing in Glasgow, they had updated their look to “Brothers Grimm”, a style involving many corsets and petticoats.
“Art can’t exist in any kind of vacuous place, without informing the next thing,” Davies says. “Some of my favourite music is written about literature. Some of the greatest films are only so great because of their score. Any art form is the sum of all of its parts. But I think as a band in particular we do draw a lot from cinematic and literary references and tropes – our music videos are all based on massive mood boards from the history of cinema and art and things that we magpie because we think they’ll look beautiful and compelling. It’s very informed by being in a privileged position of being able to access the entire library of human creativity on the internet.”
Religious motifs ripple through Prelude to Ecstasy: Morris and Lizzie Mayland, the band’s rhythm guitarist, were raised Catholic; on My Lady of Mercy and elsewhere, the former grapples with her tricky relationship with faith.
“It’s about having feelings for women as a woman and coming to terms with that growing up in a very Catholic family and school,” Morris told Dutch TV last year. “And having simultaneous feelings of excitement and discovering yourself – but also lots of shame and fear and guilt. I wrote it to try and free that part of me that was proud of it, exploring it through Catholic imagery rather than hiding from it. Using it for my own gain.”
Twenty years ago The Last Dinner Party would have had time to enjoy their success before the inevitable backlash. But because we live on the internet now and everything happens far too fast, the negativity has arrived on the heels of the acclaim. To quote the noted 21st-century philosopher Taylor Swift, the haters gonna hate – and by last summer, snark about The Last Dinner Party was sloshing around the internet, fuelled by conspiratorial whisperings that they were an “industry plant”.
The gist of the accusation was that they were a fake band assembled behind the scenes by moguls and cynically shoved out into the world. Detractors pointed out that they were middle class – I’ve met far posher English bands, plus a few Irish ones – and were signed to Q Prime, an international management company with offices in New York and London.
These claims did not stand up to scrutiny. At Q Prime, their manager is an Irishwoman, Tara Richardson, a respected champion of alternative music and nobody’s idea of the second coming of Simon Cowell. Before working with The Last Dinner Party, she discovered the Cork/Dublin group The Murder Capital and the Maynooth songwriter Nell Mescal (sister of Paul). The former, in particular, are critically beloved. Why, then, were The Last Dinner Party torn apart on social when The Murder Capital were not? It’s hard not to look past their gender.
“Exactly. There are all-male bands signed to the same label as us who have never faced any backlash,” says Davies. “In that way it’s so black and white – that it is a thing of misogyny.”
In a separate Zoom window, Emily Roberts, the band’s lead guitarist, nods her agreement.
“I’m glad how people defended us,” she says. “So many people defended us, which was good. We want to move past it.” The backlash “came from disbelief that we could do this ourselves”.
“Obviously we’ve had labels and management, which has helped as well. The image and the music was all formed before we started gigging. The unusual nature of it came from that. If people don’t believe it, that’s their choice.”
Early in her career, Tara Richardson experienced anxiety attacks and has spoken about the importance of looking after one’s psychological wellbeing in a challenging business such as the music industry. Her experience has stood to The Last Dinner Party, according to Davies.
“She is very passionate, luckily, about artists’ mental health. It’s such a hard space to navigate, especially as a manager. You want to give your band every opportunity that comes their way: if you do this thing, then you’ll get these opportunities; you’ll be more successful. It’s such a difficult line to tread, to perhaps say no to a lot of things that would be too much to take on board,” the bassist says.
The gift Richardson has given The Last Dinner Party is the ability to politely take a moment for themselves if it’s ever all too much.
“She does such a good job of keeping us away from being so overwhelmed by everything that we have to say yes to everything. She makes us aware that this is a great opportunity but that, if it’s too much, you can say no, and something else will come up,” Davies says.
“Big respect to her for that: you hear horror stories of managers having such tumultuous relationships with their artists because their interest is only making them successful, whereas it’s good to have a manager who has a vested interest in making us a success, yes, but also [ensuring the band are] still happy and alive.”
For all the talk about hype, The Last Dinner Party are extremely hands-on. Davies looks after the group’s X account, through which she recently voiced her support for the Dublin indie newcomers Sprints when they cracked the UK top 20 with their debut album. In the run-up to last year’s show at the Workmans Club in Dublin, Davies posted a polite message asking the men of the internet if they could be a bit less creepy in their interactions.
“Need lads on here to know we see the weird shit you post about us and are highly unimpressed,” she wrote. “Have some f**king decorum”.
“Obviously, we get fringe lunatics and weird messages,” Davies says, adding that comments about her and her bandmates had gone beyond merely bizarre and into straight-up leering and worse. “It was getting into more people going, ‘Oh yeah, I would,’ or whatever. Just casual, more socially acceptable misogyny. On a platform like Twitter, people think I’m not on it. But I’m seeing it. F**k off, it’s really embarrassing: you’ve made a dick of yourself.”
The best rejoinder to the idea that they are all hype and no trousers (or petticoats, given their dress sense) is that Prelude to Ecstasy is a fantastic album. They had the good fortune to record it before the spotlight was beaming straight into their eyes. They grow more appreciative of that privilege with each passing day, says Mayland.
“It was over a year ago,” she says of making the LP. “Last January and the November, December before that. We stopped for Christmas and then came back. Not being under scrutiny while we were recording was a massive blessing. We’re very grateful. It would be really, really stressful trying to record it now.”
Mayland pauses, thinking about how far the band have travelled, as well as about the year ahead and the many highs and lows inevitably coming their way. She sighs. “You wouldn’t be able to help but try to live up to the attention we’ve got.”
Prelude to Ecstasy is released by Island Records
