By Anastasia Baker, Music Subeditor
With their baroque-adjacent, lavish identity - all flowing dresses, corsets and Greco-Roman set-pieces - The Last Dinner Party's live presence is cinematic, and breathtaking.
The Prospect Building seems an apt venue to house them: it’s almost colosseum-like if you imagine its great pillars as columns. Not so great if you end up standing behind one of them, though.
The opener, Imogen and the Knife, is a solo act - live, however, she’s backed up by a band, and her 2024 single 'Red (is my colour)' swells to greet us. This is the perfect first course; the yearn and tension of her voice speaks to the darker side of The Last Dinner Party, with careening guitars and trumpets dialling up into foreboding crescendos, never brightening.
There’s a special guest part way through the set. Lizzie Mayland, rhythm guitar for the main event tonight, joins Imogen to play ‘Mother Mother’ from their fresh new EP The Slow Fire of Sleep. This is a brooding one; the jangling lows of a down-tuned acoustic guitar are accented by the complex peaks of Imogen and Lizzie’s intertwined voices. They implore to the unseen mother through the intriguing motif of bread - “But mother, I can’t get this love to rise” cries the chorus. We’re very much set up for the headliners now, then; if there’s anything The Last Dinner Party loves to write about, it’s motherhood and womanhood (see ‘I Hold Your Anger’ and 'The Feminine Urge').
After the classic thirty minute wait in which I have to remind myself what we’re about to witness in frequent pinch-me moments, like the theatre, the lights dip. In previous years and previous tours Prelude to Ecstasy, the orchestral drama from the titular debut album, introduced the show: now, we’re straight to it - plunged back into light, the band rip into ‘Agnus Dei’ with the total sense of release and abandon that will define the rest of their performance.
This is one of the songs that gains new power live. I realise I’ve overlooked it in my listen throughs of the album, somehow: it has a theatricality which is undeniable in the context of the stage, a quality of triumph and victory that lends itself to bittersweet goodbyes. It’s perfect, then, that ‘Agnus Dei’ returns like an old friend at the tail end of the show - but more on that in a moment.
There’s a real sense of business and sophistication in the following track, an ideal second song - the I-don’t-know-how-it’s-not-a-single banger ‘Count the Ways’.
We march through this with satisfying efficiency and make a foray into the debut album: the lyrical mastery of ‘The Feminine Urge’ trades off for the glittering Roman heights of ‘Caesar on a TV Screen’, then we settle to the ground for a moment with the soothing ‘On Your Side’, only to plunge into one of their most urgent, pacey numbers ‘Second Best’.
Something that many live acts lack is audience interaction - that sense that your show is specific and unique, that this isn’t just a night of many nights, many repetitions. Morris has this down; there are playful moments, like the pause to teach us the vaguely ridiculous moves to ‘This is the Killer Speaking’ in the encore, and an audience member requesting a name for their band (a particularly memorable moment as the whole band comes together to seriously consider the question).
They tell us about Ribbons for Provisions, a charity fundraiser backed by Banquet and orchestrated by the band themselves that strives to provide for food banks and battle food poverty in the UK. Fans can donate either food or money in exchange for a ribbon. It's Banquet's highest ever fundraising campaign, and Morris announces that (by this point in the tour) they've raised £20,000. If you can, donate here!
Back to the show, and the tracks from Prelude to Ecstasy already feel iconic and backlit with nostalgia. Songs like 'My Lady of Mercy' (reminiscent somehow of a gladiator's glory, but make the gladiator more female and more gay) and 'Sinner' are great examples of this.
The industriousness of their work in the studio and on the stage is evident - they’ve churned out two albums in just eighteen months amid numerous tours - yet it all seems so effortless.
Morris floats across the stage; Roberts nonchalantly shreds (some of the most innovative solos in modern rock have come from her - see ‘The Scythe’); and all of them sing. This unified voice is really something that makes the band special: full bodied, thick with harmonies.
They even trade off the lead occasionally: Mayland fronts 'Rifle', a minefield of controlled explosions and lilting French interludes, whilst Aurora Nishevci takes 'I Hold Your Anger', whose verse swoons and chorus opens optimistically.
No band really comes together and makes their song a soundscape like The Last Dinner Party - or not that I’ve ever experienced, anyway. Literally everything about this show magnetically commands your focus.
The band end with a reprise of 'Agnus Dei', its vision of seeing "your name in lights, forever" poignantly casting us off: with a sense that the lights are instead coming up and the credits are rolling, Morris lists every member of their crew and thanks them.
This final moment where the performance becomes transparent, and the band is more than just the six people you see onstage, really sums it all up.
No one does it quite like they do.
Featured image: Anastasia BakerHave you listened to From the Pyre yet?
