Luke Spiller talks like he sings: half bravado, half confession, and just enough cheek to keep you guessing if he’s serious. On the Struts’ second album, he wanted more than another glitter bomb. “I think the whole album is definitely an evolution,” he said. “Some songs fell out easy, others were painstaking. I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder on a bunch of songs in my life.”
Painstaking here means living with the tracks for nearly a year—revisiting, tweaking, re-recording. “Unfortunately we sat on some of these songs for almost a year,” he said. “And that meant rethinking lyrics, re-singing vocals. But in the end it was worth it. They all came out the tracks.”
The first single, “Body Talks,” still sounds like the Struts, but with a shinier coat. Then came Kesha. “We’d had a relationship with her for about a year,” Spiller explained. “Somebody suggested it and she said yes straightaway. It happened really naturally. And for the most part, she’s a rock chick at heart. She loves the great British rock bands. It was a match made in heaven.”
Kesha might operate in the pop world, but Spiller isn’t sweating what that means for his own reputation. “Honestly, I’ve been busy just relaxing, not looking at my phone too much. If I read every YouTube comment, I’d be buried in a hole of comments and views.”
Touring with Foo Fighters brought its own baptism by chaos. “Me and Taylor [Hawkins], we’re Queen’s biggest fans, so we’d do ‘Under Pressure’ together,” Spiller said. “And then Dave [Grohl] goes and says we’re the best band that’s ever opened for them. Brilliant, lovely thing to say. Mark my words, people will still be asking me how that feels for years.”
Naturally, that led to a Madison Square Garden afterparty that turned into something out of a debauched tour diary. “These rock stars are one thing, but their wives—they’re the real rock stars,” Spiller said. “There was a giant afterparty, and Dave comes in just to get away for a minute, starts doing beer bongs, and suddenly 300 people follow him in. Six hundred pizzas arrive. More booze. It was a good night.”
The strut of it all lands best in “Primadonna Like Me,” a track that Spiller swears came with Elton John’s image baked in. “All I could think of was Elton in his heyday,” he said. “Full-on seventies, coked up, staying out for three days, ice cream, throwing up, crying for one, getting on stage, slapping people about. I’m not saying it’s a tribute, but I couldn’t get Elton out of my head. Music lets me do unexplainable things without consequences.”
But living like that offstage? That’s where things get blurry. “It’s a constant battle,” Spiller admitted. “Life is just a constant battle between wants, pleasures, addictions. The stage persona is no exception. Sometimes it wins, sometimes it doesn’t.”
The Struts’ sophomore record promised more—more size, more sheen, more extremes. “Second albums are always the hardest,” Spiller said. “It took every ounce of mental and physical energy to pull off. But I think we’ve delivered. These songs are better than the first album. Everything is more, more, more.”
He grinned at the thought of what’s next, as if the next afterparty or the next onstage meltdown was already waiting just around the corner. “As long as there’s wind in the flag, we’ll keep waving it.”
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