The Struts
With The Struts, frontman Luke Spiller has gone from playing tiny shows for crazy French fans to rubbing shoulders with rock’s A-list – not wasting a single opportunity along the way.
With the band, frontman Luke Spiller has gone from playing tiny shows for crazy French fans to rubbing shoulders with rock’s A-list – not wasting a single opportunity along the way.
Luke Spiller doesn’t ‘do’ understated. When we meet The Struts’ frontman pre-gig, in their dressing room at London’s Forum, he’s wearing a sheepskin jacket, leather trousers and huge pink-and-black platforms, his black Noel Fielding crop shaggy from the tour bus. Like so many rock stars, he looks in proportion on enormous stages, but larger than life off them.
It’s curious to think that The Struts have been going for nearly a decade. Having dived into our line of vision in 2016 with the album Everybody Wants (which they followed up with last year’s pop- tastic Young & Dangerous), they’re one of the best things to happen to rock’n’roll in years. All glam threads and supersized tunes, they manage to seem lovably old-school and à la mode at the same time.
How has 2019 been for you? Well, we’ve pretty much done two laps all over the world. This has definitely been our most successful year to date in terms of attendance. We did Pier 17 in New York, riding a Harley-Davidson on to the stage and having pyrotechnics, and a helicopter filming us. Our videographer had a team of, like, eight other camera people running around like his minions!
Have you been able to have a holiday? We literally just had seven days off, which was really nice before the start of this tour. When I’m at home and it’s quiet all the ideas start to come.
Back in 2010 you were twenty-one and had met Struts guitarist Adam Slack, both of you having been in bands since your teens. What were you like back then? I was definitely hungry. Very naïve, bit of a reckless idiot at times.
“It’s cool that we seem to be associated
with this resurgence of rock music.”
Probably a bit more egotistical than I am now, if that’s even possible. But ‘naïve’ is probably the operative word.
Before The Stuts you went to university briefly. What did you study? I took media studies and… something else. I’d been working as a cleaner on my gap year in Clevedon for just over a year. My band at the time all took a gap year just to see how far we could take the band. That started to fizzle out as September was looming. I wanted to stay in the Bristol area, and I kind of just rushed into UWE [University Of
West England]. I was thrown into this environment where everyone was in lectures, taking notes, and I was like: “What the hell is this?” So I grabbed the loan, the first instalment. Then I quit university and moved back to my parents’ house and tried to figure out what I was going to do. I was going to audition for drama schools in London, and that’s when I got a message on MySpace from my soonto-be manager at the time.
One of the first countries to really embrace The Struts was France. What were those first tours there like? Fantastic. We started touring France pretty much after the line-up change was made [original bassist and drummer Jamie Binns and Rafe Thomas were replaced by Jed Elliott and Gethin Davies in 2012], because Kiss This and Could Have Been Me were done in the transitional phase between the old members and the new, and those were the songs that would then go on to get us a load of airplay. But the tours were great. It was a true rock’n’roll rite of passage that everyone has to experience as a young band. We would go into the shows, drink a shedload, jump up on stage, make loads of friends with these crazy French people.
What are the best things to have happened in music in the past decade? It’s been interesting how all these biopics have been coming out, and people seem to have a thirst for that era of music and the iconic people that come with it. I think that goes hand in hand with a lot of the bands that have been coming up in the last two or three years. We’ve noticed it in America with bands like Greta Van Fleet, White Reaper, Glorious Sons… All of them have come out on tour with us. I think it’s cool that we seem to be associated with this resurgence of rock music, people just doing it and having that oldschool flavour.
Since the band signed to Interscope Records, what have been your biggest extravagances? The way that we travel. It’s nice to know that we can stay in a gorgeous hotel and float down a lazy river with a couple of cocktails, or go and have a nice boat day and things like that, which years ago we wouldn’t have conceived of being able to do. And I think