If you regularly loiter in the indiest corners of Twitter, or have even glanced at the NME homepage recently, there’s a decent chance you have at least heard of The Last Dinner Party. It’s possibly less likely that you’ve actually heard them: they have released just the one track so far. Despite this, in the last fortnight the band have received breathless write-ups everywhere from Rolling Stone to the Spectator, for their raucous live performances and baroque-inflected pop.
That sudden rush of hype has sparked a backlash: eyebrows raised on social media over the band’s big-name management and major label status; whispers about them being “industry plants” or – even worse – nepo babies. Which in turn has prompted a pointed rebuttal from the band (Not nepo babies! Not manufactured!) and their supporters. All of this, in the best part of a fortnight. The discourse is already in runaway train mode, and if you’ve been following it all you may have already had your fill. But I do think there’s something fascinating about the whole affair – a mix of old-school buzz band hype, and very modern concerns about the music industry and who rises and falls within it.
First though, a quick primer: The Last Dinner Party are a Brixton-formed five piece who have been a going concern for a year, and are signed to Island Records and the management firm QPrime. They’ve spent much of the last 12 months gigging, including a support slot for the Rolling Stones, a detail that has been leapt upon by critics as evidence of industry plant status, although (as this thoughtful Clash piece on the whole brouhaha points out) it was essentially a bottom-of-the-bill slot at a day festival in Hyde Park – a decent get, no doubt, but perhaps not the massive push it has been painted as.
In fact, it’s notable that there seems to have been zero mainstream press coverage of the band until the release of their first single, Nothing Matters, a few weeks ago. Then came the sudden deluge of approving articles. In fairness, much of that deluge is down to the quality of Nothing Matters, a Kate Bush-meets-Warpaint stomp with a chorus you could imagine being belted out at a decent sized festival this summer. But it’s impossible to deny that having big labels and management firms pushing it in the direction of journos can’t exactly hurt.
What’s striking is how atypical this buzz-building feels, compared with how most overnight successes occur these days: through prominent slots on Spotify playlists, canny use of TikTok, a well-placed sync. Compared to the methods used by, say, PinkPantheress, The Last Dinner Party’s method of gigging intensely and earning a glowing write-up in the NME feels about as current as sending your seven-inch to Radio Luxembourg. (It should be noted that all of those other routes to overnight success are usually aided by, or even dependent on, some helpful nudges from labels or/and big management companies – but they’re helpful nudges that aren’t perhaps as easy to notice as a sudden influx of media attention.)
The criticism levelled at The Last Dinner Party feels both very current and highly anachronistic. Objecting to a band signing to a major: how very Gen X of you. And didn’t poptimism wipe away all those concerns about which groups were manufactured and which were not? The difference, I suppose, is that The Last Dinner Party are nominally indie, a scene that can still be prickly around issues of authenticity – particularly when women are the focus (see also: Wet Leg). Some of the criticism though has been thoughtful and valid: see this well-argued Twitter thread from the lead singer of synth-punk trio Kill, the Icon!, who, rather than attacking The Last Dinner Party themselves, points out the wider structural inequalities at play in the music industry that lead to certain bands soaring to ubiquity while others struggle for even the slightest recognition.
This is a pretty grim time to be a musician, 98% of whom are struggling to make a living. Touring revenue for many is stagnant, record releases have to essentially operate as a loss-leader in the streaming age, and many musicians are considering quitting altogether. In this climate, it’s understandable that the rapid rise of a band would prompt suspicion and hostility. But that’s arguably better pointed in the direction of the real power centres in the industry: the majors doing handsomely while artists receive meagre revenue cheques or the touring companies posting record-breaking profits while squeezing concert-goers through dynamic pricing. In this climate any ire directed at a band who have only released one song, might easily fizzle with their next release – and have to face the vagaries of being on a major – feels a little misplaced. Maybe let’s give them another single at least before sticking the boot in, eh?
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