The Last Dinner Party: "It’s such a blessing to do this with people that you love"

You’d be forgiven for assuming that time moves differently for those of us who walk the earth, and the rising stars that scorch a path above it – given that a small number of months on this mortal plane has featured a few decades-worth of career milestones for The Last Dinner Party.

At the time of our first conversation, squished around a picnic table before their mid-afternoon slot at the most unexpectedly tropic Electric Picnic on record, so much has yet to happen to the dazzlingly decadent five-piece. Within a matter of months, they’ll have soared straight to No.1 on the UK charts with their debut album, the ecstatically-received Prelude To Ecstasy. They’ll also be able to count themselves among an exclusive group of artists, including the likes of Adele and Sam Smith, to have won  both the BRIT Rising Star Award and the BBC’s annual ‘Sound Of…’ poll.

Of course, in sweltering Stradbally, September 2023, The Last Dinner Party have only officially released two singles – but they’re no strangers to hard graft. Their Electric Picnic set caps off a busy summer festival circuit, which built on momentum already underway after lauded live shows around London, and an opening slot for the Rolling Stones back in ‘22.

“We’ve come up at such a lucky time,” the band’s commandingly charismatic lead vocalist, Abigail Morris, reckons. “Over Covid, the popular genre people were resonating with was bedroom producers – everything being made by one person, in their room, and not necessarily ever playing live.

“But coming out of lockdown, what people wanted was to be live, and see a band,” she continues. “To see everyone playing their instruments, not just one person. And to be in a sweaty room! We came at just the right time when that was happening again.”

As she points out, The Last Dinner Party – who signed to Island Records before the release of their debut single, ‘Nothing Matters’, in April 2023 – also “provided an alternative to what was happening in post-punk, with something a little more theatrical.”

Abigail previously released music, including an early demo of Prelude To Ecstasy track ‘Mirror’, under the name Amorina on Soundcloud, and more recently, contributed backing vocals to London art punk band HMLTD’s second album, The Worm. She met bassist Georgia Davies and guitarist Lizzie Mayland at university in London, before joining forces with lead guitarist Emily Roberts and keyboardist Aurora Nishevci through mutual friends in the city.

“We bonded over going to loads of live shows in London,” the singer resumes. “The London music scene has, for the last few years, been a really amazing place – really inspiring, DIY, small-scale, and constant new bands. We just wanted to be part of that.”

Although their gleefully chaotic energy appears totally in sync now – as they excitedly finish each other’s sentences, and enthuse about Electric Picnic having “one of the bougiest backstages” they’ve ever seen at a festival – Aurora points out that all of the bandmates come from very different backgrounds in regard to musical pedigree. Emily, for one, reached the semi-finals of the BBC’s Young Jazz Musician of the Year competition in 2020 – and also played in a Queen tribute band.

“As Brian May, obviously,” Abigail tells me.

“Obviously!” Aurora resumes. “And I studied classical composition for ages. I was into contemporary music, and then I went back into pop and rock – you know, the music you listen to growing up. I was like, ‘I want to be in bands now!’ And I found you guys...”

And even at this stage in their career, those close ties at the heart of the band have proved crucial to their ongoing success.

“If we were solo artists, I think we would have gone insane,” Abigail reflects. “It’s so nice that, at the end of every show, every day, and every trip, it’s just the five of us. We can just debrief, share in it together, and ground ourselves. It’s really nice doing that with people you actually have a relationship with.”

* * * * *

Five months later, in the last legs of winter, the heat of that Saturday afternoon in Electric Picnic feels like another world away. In our current reality, The Last Dinner Party have graduated from flashy up-and-comers to an all-consuming topic in conversations about new indie music, following their string of high-profile, platform-boosting awards.

Their UK chart success has also proved that the five-piece are resonating with more than just music critics and industry heads – with Prelude To Ecstasy scoring the biggest opening week for a debut LP by a band since 2015, while also becoming the fastest-selling debut album by a group on vinyl this century. They’ve won over the telly-watching public  too, with lauded performances on Later… with Jools Holland and The Graham Norton Show.

Those kinds of career leaps are hard enough to get your head around, let alone sum up in a sentence with Zen-like clarity – but the band’s Australian-born bassist, Georgia, tries her best:

“Things change constantly…” she laughs.

Catching up over Zoom, Georgia and Emily tell me that opening for Hozier across Europe, on their first major support tour, was particularly transformative.

“That was incredible, to get that experience of playing arenas, and supporting someone who’s so established and talented, but also really lovely and sweet,” Georgia nods. “We really learned a lot from that. And we feel more ready for big crowds.”

“It was pretty surreal,” Emily adds. “Especially the first show in that run of shows. We stepped out onto the stage for soundcheck, and it was enormous. It was just a crazy experience, on a different scale.”

When that tour swung by Dublin, The Last Dinner Party also managed to fit in an intimate, late-night headline show at The Workman’s Club that's destined to go down in Irish gig lore.

“That was my personal favourite headline show we’ve ever done,” Georgia says of the Workman’s gig. “It was completely surreal and ecstatic. It was the first time we’d done a headline show in a long time, so to hear people singing back the words to recently released singles, and even unreleased ones… We were all crying.

“We were quite drunk by that point, because we’d just played a show, and we had a couple of hours in between,” she adds. “You have to do something to pass the time! So it was chaotic – and so good.”

With its raw edge and hedonistic heart, the band’s sound – a brazen meeting of art-pop and alternative rock – immediately established them as a special force, both live and on record. But The Last Dinner Party’s entire visual world has always been a similarly crucial, and fascinatingly immersive, part of the appeal.

“We brainstormed, moodboarded and collaged everything together,” Georgia says of their unique, era-bending look. “That hugely informed the way we came out of the gate. The way we present ourselves in the music videos and on stage is pretty essential to the whole experience. We love dressing up, and being able to buy insane dresses – and then be like, ‘Oh yeah, this is for work…’”

Maintaining control over that kind of creative vision is important, she agrees, especially as a band made up of young women and non-binary musicians.

“We definitely have been luckier than a lot of bands in the past, when artists, particularly women, weren’t given their own freedom of expression,” Georgia considers. “But I still think there’s a long way to go in the music industry at large – in the way that a woman’s appearance and presentation is held at a significantly higher level of importance than your classic indie band. They can just roll out of bed onto the stage, and no one really gives a shit what they look like.

“Obviously appearance is important to us, because we love it,” she continues. “But there’s an expectation that, for any woman who’s an artist, her appearance needs to be centre-stage. That’s unfair.”

The band’s own visual world, and the lyrics of songs like ‘Sinner’ and ‘My Lady Of Mercy’, have also been informed by Catholic traditions – in which repression and decadence are served up in equal measure.

“Abigail and Lizzie both grew up Catholic,” Georgia explains. “I didn’t – I grew up totally without religion. But I still find the imagery really compelling. Your childhood, and the way you grow up, will always inform the way you process things in your adult life. So using the imagery of the things that were imbued with importance in childhood – like religion in their case – is a way of exorcising any trauma you sustained in that, or that you continue to have. It’s a way to explain why you are the way you are, or why you feel certain things.

“Even for myself, it’s such a rich well to draw inspiration from, aesthetically,” she continues. “It’s interesting as queer women or non-binary people to use religious, particularly Catholic, imagery to express queerness. To subvert the tradition, and use the images of the saints and martyrs to express a sort of queer female experience.”

That is something that’s particularly resonated with their fans in Ireland, where Catholic schools remain a dominant force.

“It’s funny, Abi does this bit before ‘My Lady Of Mercy’ – which is about religious trauma but also ecstasy,” Georgia tells me. “She says, ‘This one's about going to Catholic school’. And at Electric Picnic, everyone was like, ‘Yessss!’ Which is not normally the reaction that we get! It was like, ‘Who among us went to Catholic school?’ And… everyone.”

They got to lean even further into those references when recording Prelude To Ecstasy inside a converted church in North London, with producer James Ford – who’s previously worked on projects with the likes of Florence + The Machine, Blur, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, and Gorillaz, to name a few.

“He cares about what we think, so it was more of a collaboration, than him telling us what to do,” Emily notes. “He’s so talented, and very nice – and he definitely got the best out of us.”

Together, they managed to carve out a sound rich enough to warrant a title as unabashedly grandiose as Prelude To Ecstasy – as showcased from the get-go, on the album’s show-stopping orchestral opening track.

“From early on, Abi had said that it would be cool if we had walk-on music – but something classical, or of that world,” Emily recalls. “We happen to have a classical composer in the band, so Aurora wrote the prelude and the outro, and arranged a lot of the orchestral parts on the album. I think it goes with that world of maximalism really well.”

Credit: Leonn Ward

Maintaining that maximalist ethos, The Last Dinner Party also put their own captivating spin on Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Mandinka’ for a special Apple Music session back in November.

“Our manager Tara [Richardson of Q Prime] is Irish, and she’s always been like, ‘You should do this cover – it would be great,’” Georgia says of the decision to record the late Dublin singer’s 1987 track. “And then obviously with Sinéad O’Connor’s passing, we thought it would be a nice thing to do. She’s so incredible, and I’m such a big fan, so it was really nerve-wracking to cover.”

There’s been plenty of other Irish artists on the band’s radar too, including Nell Mescal (“our queen”), Fontaines D.C., and SPRINTS – while they claim their “dream co-headline tour would be with CMAT.”

“There’s always so much good music coming out of such a small country,” Georgia nods – looking ahead to the band’s upcoming headline shows in Dublin and Belfast. “We feel such an affinity with Ireland everytime we go there.”

Of course, in addition to the love they’ve been received with in this country and beyond, and the continued critical accolades, The Last Dinner Party have also had to navigate the more difficult territory that comes with success – with their rapid ascent to fame attracting bitter scepticism online, and misogyny-fueled ‘industry plant’ accusations, largely flowing in from the nameless and faceless corners of the internet.

But just as the band emphasised around that picnic table in our first conversation, their friendship remains a profoundly precious saving grace.

“Having each other is so essential to being able to deal with it, in any kind of way, without having mental breakdowns all the time,” Georgia remarks. “We’re very good at communicating with each other, and relying on each other. It’s such a blessing to do this with people that you love.”

• Prelude To Ecstasy is out now. The Last Dinner Party play The Telegraph Building, Belfast (September 18) and 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin (October 7 & 8).