THE STRUTS
There have been wild nights, bad decisions, imposter syndrome and much more, but The Struts never stopped wanting to be the biggest and the best.
One night in Miami, through a blur of tequila and bad decisions, Luke Spiller realised he had gone too far.
Arguably it was always going to happen. An aspiring dancer who studied Michael Jackson videos, taught himself piano and wore women’s clothes as a teenager, Spiller had long burned harder and faster than his peers. After relocating to Los Angeles, his maximalist personality was teamed with heavyweight glitz, bolstered pre-covid by a split with his long-term girlfriend, model Laura Cartier Millon. It was like striking a match over petrol.
As pandemic restrictions eased, things escalated in good ways and bad ones. There were days of fervoured creativity. People-watching and songwriting. Wild parties. Multiple girls. Nights in Hollywood that turned into days, waking up in “some stranger’s weird-ass apartment” and wondering what just happened.
It all peaked that pivotal Miami night, fuelled by tequila, pink cocaine and a rampant lack of inhibition. At one point, he tells us, everyone thought he was dead. The song Bad Decisions, a searing slice of honesty on The Struts’ career-topping fourth album Pretty Vicious, was born in his hotel room.
“I can’t go into too much detail,” he says. “I hurt a couple of people who didn’t deserve to be hurt. I was kind of seeing someone at the time, I really let them down, and it all came back and blew up in my face. But I managed to smooth everything over. It was sort of…” [he thinks about this] “I think there was a couple of moments last year where I just didn’t really give a fuck. I didn’t care what anyone was thinking.”
In one sense, that’s Spiller all over. It’s there in his stage presence – part Noddy Holder, part Liberace, part megachurch minister. It’s there in the songs that drew us to The Struts in the first place – proudly bold and bright while their contemporaries played it cool. The fearlessness that’s brought them this far.
It’s also there in the nuanced picture of success that Pretty Vicious paints: jubilant highs, vulnerable lows and a lot in between; reflections of four thirty-somethings who’ve seen and done so much since the precocious, “character-driven” days of Kiss This and Dirty Sexy Money.
Recorded mostly live, and co-produced by Julian Raymond
(Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick), Pretty Vicious is the band’s truest team effort to date, and their mercurial singer/chief lyricist’s most honest work. There’s joy and heartache here. More-ish grooves and guitars. Queen-esque harmonies. Snapshots of life in a time of money, sex and opportunity.
