The Last Dinner Party was just starting to get it together and began talking about rehearsing when the COVID lockdown happened. As a result, the band went into a sort of creative incubator period, during which it developed a visual identity as well as a sonic one.
“I think, often, for bands, the way that they get better is…you just play live, like, kind of straight off the bat, while you’re still figuring shit out. We couldn’t do that,” says lead singer-songwriter Abigail Morris in a recent Zoom interview. The London-born five-piece brings its unique brand of indie rock to the Agora on Monday, April 6.
“We were so well-rehearsed because all we did was rehearse,” says Morris. “Every time the lockdown lifted, we just went in and rehearsed, and rehearsed, and rehearsed. And then, there was nowhere to play. So, all we could do was just get better. So, when we came out, we were fully formed ’cause we had so much time.”
The Last Dinner Party played its first gig at the George Tavern, a small club in London. Twenty people showed up.
“And it was so fun. So scary,” says Morris. “That was what we cared about. That was the most exciting thing for us, was the idea of playing live. We weren’t really thinking about recording or doing anything like that. We were just so desperate to be in a social space, and be in a community space, and have that world that we had before COVID, where we’d go see bands all the time.”
Morris credits the busy London music scene as the band’s education. She refers to music as their “greatest cultural export.”
“All our friends were in the scene. We’d spent so much time going to gigs before COVID. We knew all the venues we wanted to play,” says Morris. “There was like a mini blueprint. Just play the Windmill [a 150-capcity club in Brixton] as much as you can.”
The band’s U.S. debut wasn’t too far behind. Morris remembers all the group’s members dressing as different iconic Britney Spears looks because it was Halloween when they landed in Washington D.C. for their first U.S. show.
“And it was such a shock,” says Morris, “Because, like, to get all the way to America and have people there already waiting for us – unimaginable, and so cool.”
Morris credits the band’s crossover to the amount of radio airplay the band was receiving and to the Last Dinner Party’s debut single and biggest hit, “Nothing Matters.”
“It was originally just a piano ballad. And it was quite a happy song. It’s a lot easier to write about heartbreak and sad things. So, I was trying to write a song about being happy, in love,” says Morris.
She found the evolution of the song hard to pin down in words.
“When we started working on it – the reference that I pulled – I was like, ‘Let’s do like ‘Watermelon Sugar,’” says Morris. “That’s how happy I wanted it to go. Everyone came in with their taste. It’s so hard to say anything about [the production process] because there’s such an alchemy to it.”
The band’s chemistry is also on full display in “The Feminine Urge,” which was, in fact, inspired by the meme.
“There was a reason why it was a meme; cause it hit on something so primal,” says Morris. “‘Feminine Urge’ was from a more angry, introspective place, thinking about generational wounds and motherhood. What it means to have children, what it means to have daughters and raise them.”
“Caesar on a TV Screen” is another standout on the band’s 2024 debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy.
“I had a boyfriend at the time who was really obsessed with Russian literature,” says Morris. “I was interested in it, as well, but he was particularly interested in it. And I just found it really fascinating, this, like, masculine obsession with figures like Stalin, and Lenin.”
The song’s original title was “Leningrad.”
“I just noticed it in many artistic male friends of mine, that they’re really fascinated by this masculine urge to destroy, and to name something after yourself, and to kind of raise a city,” says Morris. “Why are men so obsessed with tearing down these cities and then naming them after themselves? If you look at all these men, they’re all doing it ‘for the greater good’ and ‘for the people,’ but then it comes down to this egomania kind of place. I thought that was something to look at. And I wanted to do it in a campy way.”
For last year’s follow-up full-length, From the Pyre, the band was intentional about not letting the momentum of the previous body of work impact the vision.
“We were coming from a place of feeling just excited, creatively. And I think if we weren’t, we wouldn’t make another record. We wouldn’t feel the pressure to,” says Morris. “When we went into the studio to start working on it, we made the point to be like, ‘We’re not gonna try to recreate the first record. We’re not gonna try to do anything better, and we’re not gonna try to do anything different. We’re just gonna do exactly what we wanna do now.”
Morris remarks that there is, of course, some sonic overlap, due to the albums being created close together in time. But the band also ventures into new territory and has some fun with it.
“This is the Killer Speaking” was inspired by Johnny Cash era country, with a Stones-esque English spin. It was also inspired by Morris getting ghosted for the first time.
“It was a way to be making light of the situation. Cause I was like, I’m so offended, I’m so upset. But I’m gonna channel it into a song that’s cheeky. That’s a murder ballad. It’s not serious. You, know, it’s like I’m turning this into something that I can have fun with.”
A pigeon flew over Morris, where she was sitting on a park bench in Soho (London; not New York) and distracted her for a moment.
“Well, ‘Woman of a Tree,’ it feels powerful to play onstage, I think, cause there’s a lot of really close harmony and shouting,” Morris says when asked about her favorite track on the band’s sophomore record to play live. “It was like our version of, our interpretation, of like a classic folk song. Where there’s not a verse, and a chorus; it’s just like a continuous build of this hypnotic verse over and over again, that’s getting to, like, the big climax. And it’s just really fun.”
But the crowd is the main character, of course.
“I like looking into the front row and making eye contact with everyone…And being together,” laughs Morris. “That feels very powerful. Especially when there’s a lot of young women in the front row. There usually is.”
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