From the whispers of excitement that surrounded Gabriels’ first ever live shows last summer, to packed-out gigs at countless new music haunts, the capital’s music scene is bouncing back after a couple of challenging years. In July alone, major shows in the city by Blur, Beyonce and Lana Del Rey supercharged the city’s economy but it’s not just about the big names. London has always been a hotbed of talent, fuelled by a passionate crowd, and word of a good gig seems to spread like wildfire. And right now, smaller venues are busy birthing the next big thing.
After the dormancy of Covid, music lovers have returned to gigs in droves, with an estimated 65 per cent rise in online ticket sales from 2022. And it seems like the industry has followed suit. Proving the power of the “if you know, you know” approach, some of London’s hottest acts are getting major festival bookings and causing record label bidding wars with barely any music officially released.
Riding off the back of hype, winning over crowd after crowd and letting the word spread as audience members excitedly recommend new acts – you’d be forgiven for thinking some of the country’s current buzz acts have appeared from nowhere. Picture Parlour at The Windmill in Brixton; HotWax’s Lexington gig or The Last Dinner Party’s debut at The George Tavern - these modest gigs on sticky floors have already gained legendary status in shooting these new bands to success.
This isn’t a new thing, of course. London’s independent venues have been churning out new stars forever, but after years of the pandemic seeming to streamline all musical success through social media; as the charts became dominated by TikTok hits gone viral from 30 second snatches of music, the return of live music seemed to be a pipe dream.
And yet, new bands are bucking the trend, gaining the attention of powerful managers, winning over booking agents and bagging coveted festival slots before even heading into the studio by means of nothing but a knockout live show. It seems that in London, word of mouth is back in a big way.
That’s how The Last Dinner Party got linked up with QPrime, the management powerhouse behind acts like Metallica, Muse and Foals. “A studio engineer I worked with on a record in 2018 was at the George Tavern in East London in November 2021. He saw the first The Last Dinner Party gig, and texted me straight away saying ‘I think I’ve just seen the next best band’,” their manager Tara Richardson says.
“I followed them immediately and watched what little footage was available online. They were the best songs I had heard in several years.” The same early gig footage that hooked in QPrime also started a label bidding war which saw the five-piece sign with Island Records. And yet they hadn’t even set up a TikTok account until April this year, and shared no teasers of music until their debut single Nothing Matters dropped in April this year.
Instead the band poured all their effort into live performances, with fan-filmed clips from their shows at XOYO and Moth Club, or support slots for Nick Cave and The Rolling Stones, gaining them a cultish following.
On one of the few videos of their live shows, the comments overwhelmingly show audience members expressing the feeling that they’d witnessed something special, clamouring to share their experience of seeing the new band.
“Pretty sure I’ll be repeating that ‘I saw them in a little tent at Wilderness in August’ for years”, one writes; “watched them yesterday at The Rolling Stones in Hyde Park. Absolutely fascinated”, says another.
“Everyone who’s become involved with the band has been through a live show”, says Katherine Parlour, lead singer of Picture Parlour. Another success story of the London live scene, the rock four-piece only played their debut show at Brixton’s Windmill in December 2022, but thanks to an incredible audience reception, they’ve swiftly become one of the most hyped newer bands in the country.
Theirs is the sort of story you expect to read in a weighty music biography one day – “We reached out to a bunch of promoters and got blanked by basically every one of them because it was our first show,” Parlour says.
Thanks to The Windmill’s liberal booking policy - they listen to every demo sent their way and have no requirements for bands to sell a certain amount of tickets or have a certain number of fans - the booker at the venue, Tim Perry, threw the band a bone, making Picture Parlour the latest in a long legacy of bands to have been backed early by the venue - including Bloc Party, Hot Chip, The Vaccines, Shame and Black Midi.
“We just rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed to make sure we put on a good performance,” Picture Parlour’s guitarist Ella Risi says, “Tim told us it didn’t matter if it goes shit, just enjoy it. It was the most magical show, I think it’s still my favourite we’ve ever done, there was just something in the air.”
For his part, Perry says simply, “I haven’t seen anything like that in many years.”
So is this an antidote to music’s recent obsession with virality, with new bands taking a slow-and-steady approach, building up hype one crowd at a time and letting the mystery around them do all the marketing for them?
Well, not entirely, says Perry, pointing out that you can’t entirely separate word of mouth from social media. Fat Dog is another success story coming out of The Windmill - their chaotic rock has bagged them a slot at Reading and Leeds festival without them ever releasing a song, but their reputation was built via fan activity online, as word of their wild live shows spread thanks to footage posted.
“Kids in France and Belgium know who Fat Dog are through YouTube, and they haven’t released anything yet,” Perry says.
Many of these are uploaded by Lou Smith, a south London-based videographer. By sharing videos of full live sets from Fat Dog and The Last Dinner Party, among other Windmill alumni like Fat White Family and HMLTD, and pairing the audio from the sound desk with a single-camera video of the entire gig, Smith helps word of mouth travel beyond city-centric scenes. Footage he took of Picture Parlour’s debut show was even reposted by Courtney Love, a major step in the band’s swift rise.
For a long time Smith’s videos were the only place you could hear a Fat Dog or The Last Dinner Party song. Now, go down to one of their shows, and you’ll see people singing along to every track, as Smith’s uploads continue to rack up tens of thousands of views.
“Somebody came up to me at a Fat Dog gig at The Windmill and said, I’ve just come from Northampton for this because of your videos,” Smith tells me. “It gives fans something to hook onto. They obsess about every tiny little thing, and you can see that they’re going through the video on a minute level, learning the words, getting to know the songs. It creates a culture.”
There is a tricky side to this apparent appearance from nowhere, however. Both The Last Dinner Party and Picture Parlour have been accused of being industry plants and attacked over the quality of their output, usually by people that haven’t seen them live. On the days their respective debut singles dropped, both bands prompted Twitter storms, with people accusing them of being fake or buying their success with rich parents’ money.
“There’s been a few occasions where an industry dude will come to the show and almost reluctantly be like ‘Oh, I guess the hype is real’. Anyone that sees our show knows we’re not frauds”, says Parlour (as anyone who was at that first gig will attest). Melissa Darragh, who was in the crowd at Picture Parlour’s debut show tells me that “their front woman’s mighty croons weren’t like anything I’ve seen there before. They were big and bold, and musically fantastic. After they had finished I stood back, and said wow.”
“When we finished our set, people were actually coming up to us asking when the next show was,” Risi tells me (The Windmill invited them back to play again the following week). But Twitter critics shared screenshots of Picture Parlour’s Spotify stats on the day their single Norwegian Wood hit streaming platforms, claiming they didn’t deserve press attention due to their low monthly listeners. It’s clear that a lot of people have forgotten that growing your reputation offline and winning over crowd after crowd is as organic as you can get. In fact, it’s the only way it used to be done.
“All of my idols came through that way. In the 70s, 80s, 90s, up until recently, that’s all there was”, says Parlour. Playing support slots, winning over crowds and impressing a rogue industry head in the crowd is the tale of almost every musical icon. In 1981, a still unknown Prince supported The Rolling Stones. In 1967 before the release of Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix opened for The Monkees.
So The Last Dinner Party warming up Mick Jagger’s crowd at The Rolling Stones’ Hyde Park show last year, or Picture Parlour being on the same bill as Bruce Springsteen isn’t as wild as you might think. And just as Jagger’s swagger earned him a place in history or T-Rex’s stage presence made him an icon, a great live show that people talk about is the true foundation of a sustainable fan base.
“Growth in terms of audience has changed since social media became global,” Richardson adds. “But to build a true, consistent fanbase, you have to play shows. Nothing has changed in that respect.”
A 48-minute long, single-camera YouTube video including all the between song chatter and pauses to tune up couldn’t be farther from the 15-second, snappy TikTok sounds that have dominated music and its discourse for the last few years. Returning to a more traditional format, where bands get big the old-fashioned way, feels comforting, and authentic - it’s what music was built on.
As venues continue to recover from years of lockdowns, this new wave of bands rising quickly from the smaller stages is a hopeful sign. Hype breeds hype, bringing excited crowds back to struggling independent venues and drawing attention to the under the radar stars of the future. I’ll see you down the front.
