The Last Dinner Party

In April 1815, as Mount Tambora laid a blanket of darkness over Europe during the most powerful volcanic eruption in recent history, Mary Shelley felt compelled to write one of the first Great gothic novels: Frankenstein. Today we are faced with our own apocalypse brewing beyond our bedroom windows; a dying earth and the death of realism in a post-truth age where nothing is real, just deep fakes, fake news and AI. But, in a world where politics and ethics are a muddy hue, The Last Dinner Party is as honest as it gets. Impassioned and unbounded, is there anything as honest and pure as art for art's sake? Inspired by the romantic, the grotesque and the gothic, they share with artists like Shelley a desire to create something both beautiful and horrifying - however they intend instead to be the crack in the sky. A shining, joyful light in the darkness. Most of them met at their university freshers week, sparking a friendship over tension-breaking pizza and cider before consolidating it over a shared passion for romantic poetry, the Sublime and David Bowie. It’s no surprise then that they have an almost academic approach to their music. Years of gig-hopping in and around South London (what they like to call “research”) led to them incubating their ideas for what the band should be. They mind-mapped and moodboarded, even wrote a manifesto, but more than anything, “we wanted to be a band that we would have aspired to be when we were teenagers”. The balance between the real and surreal forms the artistic foundation of The Last Dinner Party. “Being both hyperreal and theatrical is the most honest you can be through a romantic lens”, they proffer. “We are theatrical, but none of this is an act. This is how we are. Onstage we are simply a platonic form of ourselves. Hyper-honest. Hyperreal”. Yes, there are corsets. There is lace and velvet, stockings, suspenders and synchronized clapping, but at the core of this band there are lucious world-building pop songs that sound as big as a universe, and encompass the universality of human emotion. “Artists that come on stage reserved and looking too cool for school put on a lot more of an act than we do- we’d be exhausted if we had to do that! We want our audience to feel euphoric in every sense of the word. Euphoric through joy, or euphoric through the exorcism of pain or the absence of anger or grief; a personal experience of catharsis”. The songwriting process of The Last Dinner Party is cathartic for the band too. Lead singer and main songwriter Abigail Morris explains that she can only write about deeply personal experiences but within a framework of magic realism. She engages with what are apparently simple themes such as love, joy, and grief, but their innate complexity is drawn from them and illustrated upon the canvas by the delightfully dressy nature of the instrumentation. ‘And i will fuck you, like nothing matters’, she sings in the first single Nothing Matters, her direct lyrics becoming refracted through multiple synth parts, gently psychedelic guitars and horns before erupting into a colourful, catchy chorus. A simple beam of light sent through an intricate diamond. No rhythm for the band is too complex and no sound is out of reach. This has allowed them to cultivate the maximalist sound we hear. That, and the simple fact that “it's just so much more fun to make a massive sound than a little one! And to just casually throw an organ on to a track, or to have not one, but five, tempo changes- we’re like kids in a candy store.” The job of harnessing such a big, decadent sound was left in the capable hands of legendary producer, James Ford (Gorillaz, Arctic Monkeys, Florence + The Machine). For these five young women who were raised on his albums, working with Ford was “life affirming. He totally let us make the album we wanted to make, he facilitated all our wildest ideas, and gave us so much space and respect and time.” Fittingly recorded in a converted church in North London, James would get to work in every crevice of every nook and cranny, using a 360 degree microphone to create a multidimensional sound. Orchestral strings, timpani, brass, percussion and flute were added, all arranged by the band themselves. “James made each of our individual parts into a whole world” and this unique collection of songs into a universe… But of course, that’s all we’ll get for now. Known already for their story-telling and myth-building, The Last Dinner Party are unafraid to leave us on a cliffhanger. With a unified sparkle in their eyes you can tell they will not rest in this current incarnation, that they are destined to evolve and change as musicians at the same rapid pace that they will grow at as people. “We don’t want people to know what to expect because that’s not fun for us either.” Sometimes there needs to be no other purpose other than pleasure.