The song

The Last Dictator is actually a four-track song on Crime and the City Solution’s 1990 Paradise Discotheque album. This video features The Last Dictator I – there is also parts II, III and IV. The band itself comes from Australia and has had a few iterations. They started in 1977 and broke up in 1979 without having released any official recordings.

A few years later singer-songwriter Simon Bonney was in London and formed another version with members of the just defunct Birthday Party (including Roland S Howard and Mick Harvey)- this outfit lasted from 1985 to 1991. That was the time when the band put out four albums, including Paradise Discotheque. They busted up again in 1991, eventually reforming in 2012 and making the 2013 album American Twilight.

The beer
This is one of a trio of beers from the Yeastie Boys. Called the Spoonbender series, they all take their names from Crime and the City Solution songs – the other two are The Sly Persuader and The Sun Before the Darkness (from the same Paradise Discotheque album). The beers were a hybrid of beer and wine – the Yeastie Boys took wine from Australian winemakers Some Young Punks and turned it into candi sugar  and then refermented it into the beer.

The Last Dictator is an imperial porter clocking in at 10 per cent. I’ve had the various Spoonbender beers before and I do recall them being quite good. And just a little bit weird – that candi sugar does give the beers a wine-like character.

The reason, from Yeastie Boys’ Stu McKinlay:
Yet another Australian now, this time because this beer was a part of a series that we collaborated on with South Australian winemakers Some Young Punks.

The name comes from Crime and the City Solution’s Paradise Discotheque album and The Last Dictator seemed a suitable name for an imperial porter. Dark, mysterious, dangerous.

I’d been working on the three Spoonbender beers with working titles from Rowland S Howard’s Teenage Snuff Film and this one was going to be called Exit Everything.