‘Totally surreal’: The Last Dinner Party’s Australian homecoming
The Last Dinner Party bassist Georgia Davies left Australia as a teen, only to return years later as part of one of the UK’s buzziest young bands. The band return to Australia this month with a new album and renewed faith in each other.
Georgia Davies was 16 years old when her family decided to move from Sydney to England. At the time, the teenager’s live music experience consisted of a few high school talent shows alongside her brothers.
Her next brush with Australia’s live music scene was a slight upgrade: performing to massive venues and festival crowds with her chart-topping, award-winning band, The Last Dinner Party.
“Totally surreal,” Davies tells InReview as she prepares for the group’s second Australian tour this month.
Davies and her family had only planned to stay in England for a few years, but Georgia ended up staying on to live and study in London, where within a week of starting university she met Abigail Morris, a fellow English Literature student, and an Art History student named Lizzie Mayland.
Music, along with a shared love of Victorian gothic literature, was always key to their friendship even if it took a further three years before they started making it together.
“We genuinely just loved going to see live music in London,” Davies says. “There are so many really iconic, really small, maybe 100-capacity, venues in London. We saw a lot of great bands in those years that were really formative and inspiring.”
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Joined by guitarist Emily Roberts and keyboard player Aurora Nishevci, the group gave themselves the arty, feminist-coded name The Dinner Party and dipped their toe into the London live scene they had come to love. It couldn’t contain them for long.
“We started to play shows where we had a 30-minute set,” Davies says. “We were not that many gigs deep when someone filmed one of those early shows – probably in a room with 50 people in it.”
Alongside bass guitar, Davies’ band duties included handling the band’s email account, where it soon became clear that something had changed once the video hit YouTube.
“That video from gig four or five ended up circulating around record label inboxes, and then all of a sudden I was getting all these emails from music lawyers and agents and managers and all these people with titles that I didn’t even know existed!
“I was like, ‘Why do I need a lawyer?’ So that was pretty crazy. But then we just kept gigging, kept organically cultivating a following in London before we’d released any music.”
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They eventually signed to Island Records, rebadged as The Last Dinner Party, and recorded their debut album Prelude to Ecstasy. The album featured polished, but largely unchanged versions of songs heard in that first live video, including breakthrough single Nothing Matters – a track that mixed Sparks, Kate Bush and ABBA influences with a chorus seemed primed for festival crowd singalongs.
The album debuted at the top of the British charts, won the group a Rising Star gong at the Brit Awards, and holy-grail festival slots at Glastonbury and Coachella. Davies subsequent homecoming – beginning at Adelaide’s Spin-Off festival 2024 and culminating in a live session on Triple J’s Like A Version – introduced local audiences to a band embracing their swift evolution from tiny rooms to some of music’s biggest stages.
“I think when we were playing small rooms, in our heads it was like the Pyramid Stage,” she says. “We’d always been giving it everything, but to have the opportunity to do big stages… we’re like kids in a candy shop.”
The band return to Australia this month tour their second LP From the Pyre, a record that sees them stretch out in the studio as much as the stage, with stadium-ready rock moments (Second Best, Count the Ways) alongside more musically adventurous flourishes (the discordant vocal harmonies of Woman is a Tree invite comparisons to American composer Caroline Shaw).
“I think we’re in a place where we felt so much more confident as musicians than we did in the first record,” Davies says. “We definitely pushed ourselves musically, just because that was exciting to us – we weren’t trying to replicate any of the successes of the first.”
Davies cites recent single Count the Ways as an example of her own contribution to the band’s collaborative process.
“It was this quite pretty piano song, and we didn’t really know what to do with it – and then I decided that it should be like an Arctic Monkeys, AM, sort of gnarly bass riff to kick it off. And so I wrote that riff and sent it in to the band.”
From the Pyre has also allowed Davies and her bandmates to move past some of the online chatter from some music fans incredulous about the group’s seemingly meteoric rise.
“I think we’ve definitely learned a lot about how to absorb or not absorb online criticism,” she reflects. “Or people who are sceptical, or basically just misogynists, who don’t believe that women can write and play their own music and instruments. I think at first that was really tough – because I just wanted to reply to every comment be like, ‘That’s not true, mate.’
“Going into the second record, which we believe in so much, I think we definitely learned how to have that faith in ourselves and each other. We’ve learned that the important thing is to just carve out our own space. To not try and do anything that didn’t feel completely authentic, and wherever that puts us in the end, will be the right place.”
The Last Dinner Party perform in Adelaide at the AEC Theatre on Tuesday January 13, concluding in Brisbane at Riverstage on Monday January 19. Full tour dates and details here.
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