Caught in the crossfade of an opium dream and a Jane Austen fever hallucination, The Last Dinner Party burn bright beneath the Roundhouse’s domed ceiling, curling gold leaf and dust motes into something ecstatic. The place is packed, gloved hands gripping plastic cups of lager, velvet-clad shoulders jostling under the weight of faux-fur collars and ironic ruffs. A masquerade for the post-ironic age, a communion of the theatrical and the reckless.
It begins not with fire, but with something quieter, something insidious in its beauty. “Beautiful Boy” drifts into the space like a breath held too long, like lace unraveling at the edges. The flute—unexpected, disarming—threads through the song like a whisper of something lost, something unreachable. Morris’s voice doesn’t soar here; it lingers, tracing the contours of envy, of longing, of the invisible privileges of masculinity. The crowd doesn’t scream, doesn’t jump—just listens, caught in the delicate web of it. It is a different kind of spell, softer, but no less potent.
Then comes the shift. “Caesar on a TV Screen” slithers in, an exorcism of powdered wigs and corseted repression. The song slithers and swells, guitars dripping with rococo flourishes before plunging headlong into raw, guttural urgency. The crowd is an organism, unified in hysteria, stomping in time with the ghosts of fallen monarchs.
“The Feminine Urge” unfurls like a silk ribbon caught in a hurricane. It is all longing and rage, the echo of a scream stifled behind a corset. Someone near the front of the crowd is weeping, smudged eyeliner catching the strobe lights. Or maybe it’s sweat. Maybe it’s all of us, undone in real time. The drums rattle like a pulse that might give out, or might drive itself into something euphoric.
Then—fire. “Burn Alive” doesn’t so much follow as ignite, baroque guitars coiling around the edges of Abigail Morris’s voice, which is a cathedral of a thing—vast, reverent, trembling at the edges like a votive candle in a storm. The band arrives in full regalia, an oil painting dragged through a mosh pit, each member poised at the edge of excess, always teetering but never falling.
Abigail Morris stalks the stage like a heroine on the edge of madness, part Salome, part Kate Bush mid-exorcism. Her voice is at once commanding and on the brink of disintegration, a voice that believes utterly in its own doom-laden poetry. And the band behind her—tight but unhinged, like a string quartet that’s been left alone with a bottle of absinthe and a copy of Ziggy Stardust. There is something deliciously unpredictable in their movement, a sense that this whole thing could slip sideways into delirium at any second.
Then, a moment of breath. “On Your Side” creeps in soft, like a hand on the nape of your neck. There’s a melancholy to it, but not a sad kind—more the kind that makes your stomach drop when you realise a night like this can’t last forever. The violins waltz gently, but the tension lingers. No one really wants to slow down, but for a moment, everyone sways in collective nostalgia for something they haven’t even lost yet.
Time distorts, moments folding over one another, each track burning its own shape into the set. Then—God, their gift for an encore—”Nothing Matters.” The thing about this song live is that it shouldn’t work this well. It’s too perfectly pitched, too elegant in its chaos, too much of a reckless mantra. And yet. And yet. When it finally arrives, it detonates whatever composure is left in the crowd. Voices hoarse from screaming back the words, arms raised like supplicants in a candlelit cathedral of hedonism. Morris wields the mic stand like a sceptre, presiding over the glorious wreckage she and her band have conjured.
It ends not neatly but in the way all great things should—frayed at the edges, bodies spent, something left open. The stage lights linger a second longer than they should, as if the venue itself is reluctant to let them go. The crowd is stunned, unmoored, looking at each other with wild, shining eyes.
The Last Dinner Party do not play gigs. They resurrect something lost, something decadent and doomed, something that belongs to another century but is screaming to be heard in this one. The Roundhouse still vibrates with the aftermath, and as the crowd spills into the cold Camden night, you can almost hear it echo:
Nothing matters, nothing matters, nothing matters—but this.
And that’s enough.
Words & photos – Richard Isaac
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