What is your Roman Empire? Mine is a girl band dressed in regency chic with enough frills and flowing skirts to make any Jane Austen character blush with envy and flap their hand-held fan. In other words, mine is the band of the minute: The Last Dinner Party.
Something melancholic lingers in the air – the Gods peer down on Bristol and cast a shower of dismal rain on the City – Pathetic Fallacy foreshadowing the tears I will later shed during the band’s heart-wrenching performance.
The beaconing light of Rough Trade beckons and offers shelter from the storm. Inside, fairy lights cover every corner of the stage, flickering and bouncing cheekily off the smiles of an already-packed crowd. The band files out on stage. We stand and we observe as if admiring a Rembrandt in a baroque art gallery. These are our muses and they look effortlessly cool tied up in black ribbon and bejewelled with crosses.
Lead vocalist Abigail Morris announces the absence of bandmate Georgia due to illness, cradling fondly a framed photograph of the bassist and placing her ornately on a stool. The band announces an entirely acoustic set before Abigail erupts into ‘Beautiful Boy’ – a crowd favourite from the recent release Prelude to Ecstasy. Morris’s vocals ricochet throughout the venue, reminiscent of Marina and the Diamonds and Florence Welch. Emily Roberts’s flute intersections combine delicately with the vocal harmonies created by Morris and Lizzie Mayland. Each member of the crowd floats weightlessly downstream. The acoustic rendition becomes a Keatsian, amorous Ode to the original song.
The set continues with ‘On Your Side’, Aurora Nishevci’s keys perfect for any drawing room recital. For one night, and one night only, the band’s quintessential female rage is exchanged like an antique playing card for a sombre, moonlight overspill of feeling. Morris conducts the crowd like a symphonic orchestra and we submit to her every command. We bellow our own war cries and resentments to ‘Caesar on a TV Screen’, awakening the little girl within us who was told she should wait for a man in shining armour. We scream and fight. We are the Joan of Arcs. We wear our own armour.
Morris introduces the band’s second single ‘Sinner’ with a twist. We are treated to an unheard intro featuring decadently layered angelic harmonies that one day “might make it onto an acoustic release”. The gig becomes a seance – a ritualistic gathering of fans summoning Aphrodite through the medium of music. We reach out from under the black, embroidered veil.
However, it is within the band’s acoustic rendition of ‘Mirror’, that all previous efforts to fight back tears fail. As Cornelia Murr once sang, ‘I Have a Woman Inside My Soul’, and this woman inside me was heard. Morris croons into the microphone “I’m a mirror, I don’t exist without your gaze”. The song sings to all, past and present. It talks of subjection, repression and duality through the most colourful lyrics. But most of all Morris sings to her seventeen-year-old self, to “teenage me who was in a lot of turmoil”, helplessly seeking a solution to the tribulations of adolescence.
The band asks the crowd for cover suggestions and is met with mocking cries of “Wonderwall!” to which Morris humorously returns “Get that sh*t out of here”. Instead, the band opts for Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’. It is instantly powerful, projecting grief and pain through an angelic, celestial and ethereal lens. The Last Dinner Party has turned one of THE most poignant songs into THE heart-break anthem of all time.
As the lights slowly increase in intensity, Morris thanks the crowd for their continued support of the album, emphatic in her thanks for keeping the band “in vintage dresses”. The band praise Bristol for their energy before transitioning into top-hit ‘Nothing Matters’ in a karaoke-esque (as if we were all wine-drunk at a Brontë character’s chapel wedding) sing-along. Morris once again cradles the photograph of Georgia to her chest as rapport and cheers fill the room. We regimentally turn and file out of the room to stand in the elongated queue, cameras poised, smiles twitching and records awaiting the mark of a signature.
I don’t have a record to be signed, but my goodness does the evening leave its own signature.
The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude to Ecstasy is out now:
@nevedawsonphotos @_nevedawson
My current role for TBGG is as a Reviewer, Interviewer and Photographer, which I do in my spare time when I'm not studying English Literature and History at the University of Bristol.
I'm available for reviews, previews, interviews and shoots through the company. Alongside TBGG I also write for The So Young, Groupie and Rodeo Magazines, with an aspiration to enter magazine and newspaper journalism focusing on culture and the arts.
What was your first Gig?
The first gig I remember seeing (when I wasn’t dragged around by my metal-head father) was The Killers live in my hometown of Birmingham in 2016. Brandon Flowers’s iridescent cowboy suit still blinds me to this day and echoes glamorous indie rock n’ roll for years to come.
What's your dream Gig?
I would have to say my dream gig would be seeing Hendrix’s star-spangled banner live at Woodstock ’69. Call me cliché but I was born in the wrong generation.
