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Why everyone thought The Last Dinner Party were industry plants
As the baroque rock group prepare to release and tour their second studio album, we look back on a rise so fast no one believed it
In July 2022, despite having not yet released a single song, The Last Dinner Party opened for The Rolling Stones. Walking out onto the BST Hyde Park stage in trailing gowns, the five figures onstage proceeded to demonstrate that they had earned their spot – they were an act to watch, the very definition of the overused phrase ‘a breath of fresh air’. They had presence, drama, a unique sound, and not a male bandmember in sight. Many in the crowd wondered, “Who are these girls?”
The group were on a run of major festivals that summer. There was a sense of mythology about them – their live shows had the London music scene buzzing. Guitarist Emily Roberts could have been Queen’s tiny blonde fifth member. Frontwoman Abigail Morris had all the magnetism of a 70s glam-rock legend. Those who saw them play were astonished – and disappointed – to learn that they had no releases on Spotify. So where had they come from? How had their major deal with Island Records materialised? Some cried foul play. The internet had a new buzzword, and when The Last Dinner Party arrived, it clung to their skirts like a burr.
People disagree over what makes an act an “industry plant”. For some, it’s any artist that seems to have had a leg up from their label – something, it could be argued, that labels should be expected to give their artists. For others, an industry plant is something manufactured, an act that labels manipulate us into liking by giving them a homespun feel, perhaps a fake backstory – anything to make them seem authentic and relatable. For many, the term is applied to any artist they had previously never heard of that they suddenly hear about a lot. Which, when a band climbs as fast as The Last Dinner Party, is an inevitability.
The level of label intervention that people will accept in the creation of an artist is complicated. Lorde was thirteen when she signed a development deal with Universal, spending years in vocal training and songwriting sessions before she was ready to debut. In the K-pop industry, label intervention is an accepted fact. Hybe’s new global girl group Katseye, one of the breakout acts of 2025, have a whole Netflix documentary devoted to their careful piecing together out of a line-up of trainees, but the group wear their origin story on their sleeves, so fans don’t mind. They’re also a pop group, so the idea of a manufactured sheen is far less offensive. Five figures in Edwardian ruffles creating baroque rock? That, the internet decided, reeked of disingenuity. When the band’s debut single, ‘Nothing Matters’, was released, the noise became deafening. These women hadn’t met by chance. This image was calculated. The public were being asked to buy into something inauthentic, so it didn’t matter that the music was good. The whole thing was, essentially, a trick.
The facts are these. Frontwoman Abigail Morris, guitarist and vocalist Lizzie Mayland (also known as L Mayland) and bassist Georgia Davies met in 2018 during Freshers’ Week at King’s College London. It was whilst attending gigs together at the Windmill that they decided to form a band. Originally The Dinner Party – although the name was later changed to avoid confusion with another artist – they styled themselves around ideas of excess, hedonism, and women doing exactly as they pleased. They were inspired by great musicians who came before – Bowie, Kate Bush, Metallica – and also by the Victorian literature they were studying. When guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Emily Roberts was recommended by a mutual friend and fellow Guildhall student Aurora Nishevci was brought in to play the keyboard, the line-up was complete – with no label input whatsoever.
Lockdown prevented them from rehearsing together for a time, and then they made the decision to wait until the live scene was fully restored before they played in public. “It was frustrating at the time, but kind of a blessing,” Morris told Rolling Stone in late 2023. “It meant we had so much time to really come out fully formed.” In April 2022, the band’s fourth ever live gig caught the attention of videographer Lou Smith, a leading photojournalist in the South London music scene. After he uploaded the footage on his YouTube channel, the band’s inbox was flooded with communications from labels, management companies and industry insiders, all with the subject line ‘Lou Smith video’. The band have credited Smith many times over the years with pouring gasoline on the embers – it was this video that led them to sign with management, and to ink their deal with Island Records just a few months later.
On one side of the internet, every success the band had seemed to count against them. The crowds being turned away from their 850-cap venue at The Great Escape were “proof” that their label had orchestrated immense buzz. The elaborate shoot that launched their Instagram displayed the money that had been poured into their image (in reality, the shoot was self-funded, staged with the help of creative friends and directed by the band themselves). Also working against them was how genuinely meteoric their rise had been. Many women – and it is usually women – accused of being industry plants, like Lola Young and Tate McRae, have a provable record of years of hard work predating their overnight success. The Last Dinner Party were a rare phenomenon, a group that really did just blow up.
And isn’t that wonderful?
Really, the dizzying rise of The Last Dinner Party should be proof that the industry can still work like it used to. Word of mouth and buzzy live performances can still be enough to get a group noticed. We’ve got so used to seeing every new artist’s career begin on social media; we expect to be able to track every step, from the first viral video to the first show (clipped for several days’ worth of content) to the tearful announcement of the first record deal. With The Last Dinner Party, it all happened in closed venues, closed rehearsal rooms, and closed boardrooms. We weren’t aware of it until their trajectory was already set, but as most have come to accept, that doesn’t make them industry plants. In an era where the pressure for new artists to market, market, market and knock on a label’s door with a ready-made audience is immense, the fact that five genuinely talented individuals can go from relative obscurity to enormous celebrity on the live scene should be a comfort. Rock and roll isn’t dead. TikTok stats aren’t everything. Sometimes it’s all about the music, and beside that – nothing matters.
The Last Dinner Party begin their UK tour this November – find tickets here
