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.

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. They also appear to be very well spoken. QED. Someone fixed it for them! They don’t deserve it! Tear them down!

It’s a terrible shame, because it seems to me the most likely reason the Last Dinner Party already have heavyweight management and a major label deal is that they are phenomenally exciting and terrific fun. They are five young women – fronted by the charismatic Abigail Morris – dressed up to the nines as if they’re auditioning for Poldark, playing music that variously summoned up Kate Bush and Siouxsie (those two inevitably, perhaps), but also Led Zeppelin, Queen, Abba and, especially – in the perpetually raised eyebrow and delight in their slyness – Sparks. They played nine songs, to a crowd who had dressed up for them in turn, and then they were gone, laughing at their own audacity.

They’re not perfect; there were times when it felt as though the rhythm section plodded a little, but they appear not to have a permanent drummer, so that will likely get sorted out. But the songs are present and correct: swooping and dramatic, crunchy and melodic. And even though you can guess what they might have been listening to, their music sounds gloriously and undeniably like themselves: like imagination left unfettered.

A bit over 40 years ago, Duran Duran were suffering the same fate at the hands of the music press: their bassist, John Taylor – who will probably still be beautiful long after his flesh has withered and his bones turned to dust – once told me they were utterly baffled why the NME hated them so much, given the band and NME’s writers liked exactly the same music. Duran Duran, of course, are now national treasures, and no one these days denies their place in pop history.

They, too, mixed unlikely influences – they wanted to sound like both Chic and the Sex Pistols – and you can hear the edginess now. Those early singles – ‘Planet Earth’, ‘Girls on Film’ and so on – have a postpunk thrust that sounded even more evident live. The less familiar songs sparkled, too – my Duran-loving friend was wildly excited that this tour has seen the return to the setlist, after 41 years, of ‘Last Chance on the Stairway’ (‘The non-electro version,’ he specified, helpfully), and it could have been a single as big as any of the hits.

There’s a reason why Duran Duran are still packing arenas, when all their new-romantic peers have long since slipped away. For all that they were sold on their looks, for all the pouting magazine covers when they were young, they had much, much better songs than any of their rivals (and they still have good songs: 2021’s Future Past album is worth your time). I don’t know if in 40 years’ time the Last Dinner Party will be packing arenas, but, to prove the naysayers wrong, I rather hope they are.