The Last Dinner Party
3Olympia, Dublin
★★★★★
It’s been a wild year for the petticoat-positive indie group The Last Dinner Party. They began 2024 as the It band to end all It bands, with songs that thrillingly split the difference between The Cure and Florence & the Machine and with a highly conceptualised image that suggested a punk-pop Jane Austen by way of Kate Bush in the Wuthering Heights video.
Hype, goth-pop, imaginative frocks: it could all have gone so badly wrong for the London-based five-piece, whose name was “inspired by the idea of a huge debauched dinner party where people came together to celebrate with a hedonistic banquet”.
There was a moment when things did, in fact, teeter slightly. Mutterings abounded about their vaguely posh backgrounds – dear God, the English and their class system – and whether a quintet of young women fresh out of university could possibly have come up with such an eye-grabbing mix of music and style all on their own. People on the internet suspected some clever men might have dreamed the whole thing up.
But they sent the detractors packing with a knock-out debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, a record that the band bring stirringly to life on the thrilling second night of a double whammy of performances at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin as they frock around the clock with delirious abandon.
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Illness had forced The Last Dinner Party to cancel several shows in the UK. But there are no indications of rustiness as Abigail Morris and her bandmates kick off with a romping Burn Alive. It’s a flaming chandelier of a track, powered by the frontwoman’s Wagner-in-the-mosh-pit vocals and a refrain that builds and builds, like a volcano primed to erupt.
The charismatic Morris is the focal point throughout. Her force of personality propels the new-wave banger Caesar on a TV Screen. She later displays considerable vocal dexterity as she flips from a roar to a hush on a spooky cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game.
But The Last Dinner Party are not a one-person show. Aurora Nishevci, their keyboardist, takes lead vocals on Gjuha, an Enya-esque piece inspired by her Albanian heritage. There’s also a starring part for Emily Roberts, who wears fairy wings and chunky sneakers and plays a signature St Vincent guitar to bring an indie-disco spikiness to the big, billowing tunes.
Those songs have a fun-house-mirror quality. You can catch glimpses of The Last Dinner Party’s influences, but they are reflected back in intriguing and eerie ways. The spirits of Freddie Mercury and Lana Del Rey swirl around Beautiful Boy. (It is no surprise to discover that Roberts was briefly in a Queen tribute band.) Portrait of a Dead Girl, meanwhile, leans into the dark-academia vibe that Taylor Swift has since picked up on with her Tortured Poets Department album.
The Last Dinner Party have plenty of their own spiritual torment to share. “Who’s got some Catholic trauma?” Morris asks by way of introducing the stomping My Lady of Mercy, an exploration of religious ecstasy and agony that culminates in a falsetto-driven hook that goes off like a riff-fuelled firework.
The encore begins with Morris popping up in one of the Olympia boxes, singing The Killer to some terrified punters. Then a fan requests a cover of Sparks’ This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us, which the band graciously rustle up on the spot.
They bring down the curtains with their biggest hit, Nothing Matters, a ballad with the transportive ridiculousness of a Bridgerton bingewatch, which acquires an added imperiousness as Morris belts out the chorus like someone standing on a rooftop dancing with the lightning.
