Do you need a Band Manifesto?

?In 2023 The Last Dinner Party shot to fame so spectacularly that they were accused of being industry plants. While they deny this wholeheartedly, there’s no arguing that from their earliest days they’ve thought about their whole experience, not just their sound, with a lot of brand savvy. And as I discovered the other day, they use the sort of marketing techniques that I wouldn’t normally associate with young indie bands. Lacking the focus and organisational skills to find myself a podcast, I was listening to the radio when I discovered that The Last Dinner Party attributed some of their success to having written, at an early stage of their band/brand’s development, a manifesto. A manifesto! I seem to have spent half my life writing or reviewing the things. How exciting to find one in use by last year’s Brit Awards’ Rising Stars!?

So I dug out the story, courtesy of the New York Times. (Not just a manifesto, but a manifesto in The New York Times!) Turns out that ‘one drunken evening in 2019’ the band members bought a cheap notepad in Brixton and scribbled down their manifesto, shown above.?

This artefact did raise a couple of questions. First, where was the blood? The wild evening allegedly included the spilling of blood onto the manifesto-containing notepad, but none is evident here. Odd, and slightly suspicious, but not that important.?

Secondly, since when did bands need the sort of direction that a manifesto provides? I suppose I can think of a few that have stood for something. Black Sabbath stood up for Satan. Mumford & Sons stood up for the banjo (until they didn’t.) But was there a Led Zeppelin manifesto? Do Taylor Swift or Arctic Monkeys have one? I’d be fascinated to read them, but I suspect they don’t exist.?

But my final thought was, is this really a manifesto? It immediately challenged my expectations of what a manifesto is, because it’s just a few nouns and adjectives thrown together – ‘decadence’, ‘gothic’, ‘romanticism’, ‘velvet’, ‘perverted’. It’s not some sort of explicit, carefully argued belief statement with nuggets of rational underpinning. It’s not how they teach you to write a manifesto in strategy school – it’s more moodifesto than manifesto.?

And that’s exactly what I like about it. Because it made me wonder if my expectations of what a manifesto should be had become a bit predictable – a page of PowerPoint, nicely written, somewhat inspiring, probably with some uplifting imagery, maybe even ‘brought to life’ in a film version. I love a good manifesto and they’ve become almost universal for directing a whole range of brand activities, but anything widely used runs the risk of predictability. This one is in a different form, it hits you between the eyes, it’s scrawly but intriguing so you try and try and decipher it. It uses words to describe mainly visual concepts so it provokes the imagination. So it’s a bit different from a ‘normal’ manifesto and all the better for it.?

Manifestoes haven’t always looked like the way they tend to appear nowadays anyway. The first edition of the Communist Party Manifesto was the shortest at 23 pages. There were no pictures. The Surrealist Manifesto was even longer, though a lot funnier. And even in the business world, manifestoes haven’t always looked the way we see them now. The first one I really remember was for Miller High Life, a densely written, beautifully art directed masterpiece that immediately got plastered around the walls of the Miller Brewing Company and its agencies, back in the days when offices had walls. It was written quickly but the brilliant, whole-team thinking that led to it (not mine) took quite a while. I once acquired a copy of Diesel’s Be Stupid manifesto. It’s so good that if copies of it had just been left on the seats of various metro trains in key cities, they would have taken over the world. The Coca-Cola Company’s Manifesto For Growth from 2005 was 59 visually stimulating, twisting and turning pages (though one of them’s just an eye.)

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But in recent years manifestoes have become a bit of a minefield. Some clients love them. Some processes insist on them. But I’ve also met clients with manifesto fatigue who’ve said, in not so many words, if I see another manifesto I’m gonna puke. I’ve seen writers asked to whip one up in fifteen minutes. And I do wonder what the client pitch experience is like if one agency after another presents its manifesto like it’s a Dead Sea Scroll. Successful techniques get shared, and when everyone’s using them they need to evolve and find new ways to spark interest. That’s one of the great things about working in a business sector that’s easily bored.

So hurrah for the Last Dinner Party Manifesto. It’s not how a manifesto ‘should’ be written. It’s different, it’s interesting, it’s evocative and provocative. It has raw energy. It’s just missing a few bloodstains.