The Last Dinner Party and the British Art School Tradition

The British art school tradition is one of the brightest jewels in the nation’s crown. While modern art schools may have been brought in to scoop up those who were clearly bright but lost in engineering or accounting, it turned into a rite-of-passage-via-imagination for artists, writers, directors, musicians and many others.

The Royal Academy of Arts’ history stretches back to 1789, but it’s in post-war England where things truly enter modernity. Leaving wartime austerity and rationing behind, the youth of the rock n’ roll era — later relabelled the ‘boomers’ — included Ray Davies of The Kinks, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, David Bowie, director Ridley Scott, sculptor Henry Moore and painter David Hockney.

The punk and new wave era of the late 70s onwards’ alumni included Ian Dury, Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, and Joe Strummer of The Clash. Pre-Britpop in the early 90s brought the Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Rachel Whiteread, Fiona Rae and The Chapman Brothers, sharing painting studio space with Graham Coxon of Blur. To a certain extent it didn’t matter what you studied at art school, as the vibes of the entire place would enter the student and enhance their thinking in perpetuity.

The Last Dinner Party, blowing up in the mid 2020s, have been accused of being a ‘packaged’ product so mercurial appeared their rise, but that’s what can happen with well-coordinated management. Also The Beatles essentially created the UK music industry, after having been packaged by Brian Epstein; and the Bay City Rollers, Take That, The Spice Girls and even Blur have gone through similar market-friendly experiences.

Packaging aside, TLDP’s debut album Prelude to Ecstasy is a genuine, bona fide rock classic, bearing repeated listens in the manner that might Queen’s Greatest Hits or ABBA’s Gold — so props to their producer too, since there are many beautifully written and played gems out there, relatively unheard without the benefit of professional sparkle-dust.

THDP formed in London in 2020. Secret-weapon lead guitarist, the truly gifted Emily Roberts and keyboardist Aurora Nishevci attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, while firecracker vocalist Abigail Morris, bassist Georgia Davies, and rhythm guitarist Lizzie Mayland attended King’s College London. Female-made art rock albums have a proud history as their own genre, taking in Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside, Joni Mitchell’s Court & Spark, Bjork’s Post, Sharon Van Etten’s Epic, and Throwing Muses’ The Real Ramona.

While TLDP have a track title The Feminine Urge, the band appear to be ‘Gen-Z’, known to be less on the ‘toxic’ edge of gender politics than some of their Riot Grrl (or even ‘Girl Power’) predecessors. Fundamentally the band genuinely seem more focussed around writing and playing powerful songs than pushing any particular message — for now at least.

State art: is shit of course, and this sort of Cool Britannia-style establishment endorsement can meet the same sort of derision as packaged pop by sundry musos (of any age). America’s Golden Age may well be ushering a post-identity politics period for the arts, where not everything that gets big needs to be pursuant of a social or moral message, and actually celebrates itself for its own sake.

In another area of the arts campaigning scriptwriters have often seemed to be very much versus the public, as in Dr Who, James Bond, Hollyoaks, just of late; and even U2’s much knocked 1989 ode to Americana Rattle & Hum could do with a little rehabilitation. Yes latter day Bono might be a bit much, but his band could knock out some killer tunes. U2’s Temple Bar days in Dublin involved their hanging out with the more artistically inclined Virgin Prunes, and this set would gather in regular homilies to David Bowie albums in the mid 70s.

Bowie had a sort of creative ADHD through that decade, as an art therapist might label it now, bouncing from psychedelic folk to heavy metal, piano ballads to glam rock, rock n’ roll musicals to Phlly Soul, Krautrock (including his Magikal Quartet of Station To Station, Low, Heroes, and Lodger) to new wave. This was in an RCA records era that prized the artist rather than demanding ‘creative representation’ under the threat of legal action, as major record labels can do now.

The Cure picked up the single-minded determination of Bowie in the 1980s, going from new wave to goth to a sort of psychedelic animalism in their mid-80s purple patch, writing hit singles about lovecats, caterpillars, birdmad girls, shaking dogs and being ‘Like An Animal’.

After messy, art-punk shaped beginnings, Blur from 1993, from For Tomorrow to The Universal, marked Blur’s Golden Years — known by some as ‘britpop’. More accurate was a wry-yet-joyous look at modern, late 20th century British suburban life, before anti-Britishness in the arts made that a risky thing to do. Another art school-influenced figure from those galvanised years was Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, whose Common People number two from the Summer of 1995 stood up as an anthemic, yet writerly highpoint of the decade — the speccy Sheffield nerd had simultaneously conquered Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage and Top Of The Pops.

Thirty years on, and deep in the grips of the technological age, who are the Misshapes now? From Cocker to Richard Tice, the wry ‘outsider’ class has gone from pre-Blair Labour to Reform, taking in the culture wars, Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Diversity has done itself to death, as have the race and gender wars — but the people still know an ecstatic, irresistible chorus when they hear it. They heard it in The Last Dinner Party’s Nothing Matters, hitting the top 20 in 2023, before being nominated for Best Band at the Brits 2025 — thirty years after Jarvis mooned a child-thronged Michael Jackson.

Austerity-thinking, and citizens being justifiably concerned about who is spending their tithe and why, is as big in the UK as anywhere else. That said, art-for-art’s-sake has as much value as the more understandable applied arts and design, made to be in the service of industry. In a technological age, with AI and robots on the doorstep a-knocking, the human will become increasingly valued: and the arts are meant to be the creative reflection of the human — not a sermon in social justice. The British art school tradition is much richer and multifaceted, and red in tooth and claw, than a million ‘progressive’ (under) graduates would have us believe.

States of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/States-Independence-Pop-Rock-Beyond/dp/B0B45DXC98