A phenomenally exciting new band: The Last Dinner Party, at Camden Assembly, reviewed

A user’s guide to how pop music works in the 21st century. Step one: you see a great new band. Step two: you tweet about them being very good. Step three: you get told by people that they are clearly nepo babies, denying crucial exposure to other bands. Step four: you discover that newspaper articles are using these Twitter conversations as evidence of a backlash about said new band.

That’s what happened after I went to see the Last Dinner Party. For reference, the Last Dinner Party have released precisely one song: their debut single ‘Nothing Matters’, which had come out a few days before. On YouTube you can find complete recordings of some of the few shows they have played, filmed by zealous young fans. A shaky phone video, however, isn’t really the best guide to a band’s qualities. So to have any idea of whether the Last Dinner Party are any good, you have to have seen them, and at this point not many people have seen them.

For all that they were sold on their looks, Duran Duran had much, much better songs than any of their rivals

That said, they already have heavyweight management; they’re signed to a major label (Island); they’ve got a superstar producer working with them (James Ford); and they are starting to get press.