This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Privilege is a touchy subject in pop music. For a supposedly demotic form, it’s curious how many of the people who make it come from really quite well-to-do backgrounds. Connections — and having a mum and dad who can cover the rent whilst you get your album together — count for a lot.
The Last Dinner Party are, undeniably, a bunch of posh girls (lead singer and guitarist Abigail Morris is an alumnus of Bedales). One thing to be said in their favour is that at least they’re not trying to pass themselves off as anything else. The other thing in their favour is that they’re great: a proper rock band with a raging sense of the theatrical at a time when that’s a rare commodity.
The band started life as a manifesto drafted by Morris and bassist Georgia Davies, which was heavy on the aesthetics: they specified rich colours, rich fabrics and put the word “decadence” at the top of the page. Their first album, Prelude to Ecstasy, was a glorious answer to the question: what if Roxy Music, but every member is Kate Bush?
Last year’s follow-up, From the Pyre, was thinner. The standout songs (especially “This Is the Killer Speaking” and “The Scythe”) brought a deliciously gothic edge to their lavish sound, and added sophisticated storytelling to their preoccupations with folklore and femininity; but too many of the tracks felt like the same ideas from before, stretched thinner.
No matter: LDP still inspire obsession.
At the Warehouse in Manchester, the crowd has definitely dressed for the occasion. (And let’s be honest, I have, too. There aren’t that many opportunities to wear my denim shorts, cowboy boots and statement blouse combo: I have to take them when they come.)
Someone in the front row has been holding her place so long that she (I presume it’s a she based on the demographics) manages to faint during the first song. Morris halts the music to mother hen over the fallen fan, and I find her care quite touching. It’s an echo of the “girls to the front” ethos of the 1990s riot grrrl movement, which prioritised safety for women at a time when crowds were often hives of violence and sexual assault.
Then it happens again five songs later, and I feel something more like annoyance. This is what you get for nurturing a following of arty girls who don’t eat, I think. And if this is occurring so often that you’ve worked out a protocol for it (down instruments, politely call for security, restart the song) maybe you should have someone visiting the front row to dole out bottled water and sandwiches during the support?
When the show works, it’s intoxicating. Dressed like Vivienne Westwood mannequins and strutting like goddesses, the band play up a storm, conjuring a world of intense drama and luxurious sensuality. As they tear into first-album songs like “The Feminine Urge” or “Nothing Matters”, the audience devotedly hollers every word back to them.
But in the cavernous space of the Warehouse, it doesn’t always travel. The venue feels both too small for the band (I suspect their next tour will see them graduate from the mid-size circuit) and too big for the show, which can’t sustain momentum through the interruptions. A long speechy interlude to plug a food bank is worthy, but by the end I feel less like donating than I did at the start.
The encore kicks off brightly with a growling, bluesy rendition of “This Is the Killer Speaking”, but then there’s another interruption — this time, for an awkward dance skit followed by the obligatory “Free Palestine” statement in response to shouts from the audience. Me and the friend I’m with exchange a look and agree it’s time to go. The spell is broken.
There’s a different kind of privilege on show watching Baxter Dury in London at the Hammersmith Apollo. Dury isn’t upper class but, musically, his pedigree couldn’t be higher: his dad Ian (of … and the Blockheads) was a post-punk legend, and Dury junior grew up in his shadow. That meant he came late to music, and I came late to him, fearing a tribute act.
I was wrong, and last year’s album Allbarone became one of my records of the year after my son nagged me to try it. It’s dancier than Dury’s previous output — he says he was inspired by Charli XCX’s Brat, as well the success of his 2021 banger “Baxter (These Are My Friends)”, a collaboration with producer and DJ Fred Again. (Fred, incidentally, is a proper aristo Marlborough boy.)
Allbarone is backboned by a darkly funny narrative of male libido and erotic failure: it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the title is a jokily run-together version of ubiquitous middle-market hospitality chain All Bar One, the perfect site for a bathetically failed date. Many of the tracks are near-duets with female vocalist JGrrey, who makes a tunefully surly foil to Dury’s brash Estuary chanting.
As a live presence, he’s phenomenal. Dury stalks the stage from wing to wing, throwing shapes and toying flirtatiously with his beige jacket whilst the music storms behind him. (There’s something about a beige suit in winter that just is skeezy.)
“I guess this is the nearest we get to going to a warehouse party together?” I say to my son, who’s come with me. “It’s pretty close,” he says, and hugs me.
