There’s a viral video that’s been haunting me for the last couple of months. In it, Richard Osman talks about the death of the band as a force in popular music. “No one is an a band any more,” he says. He voices an accepted modern truth: Gen Z doesn’t give a crap about bands, much less rock bands. But is that really true? If it is, no one has told the young women in layered skirts and puffed sleeves sitting outside Glasgow’s O2 Academy at 10.30am, waiting for The Last Dinner Party.
It’s been a precipitously swift rise for the London-based, all-female band – a blink of the eye from renowned grassroots music venue The Windmill to BBC Sound Of … and Brit Award wins, a Mercury nomination and a number one album in Prelude To Ecstasy. They’ve been compared to Kate Bush, Sparks, Stevie Nicks, Roxy Music, ABBA, David Bowie and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
