The Struts
Luke Spiller, frontman of Derby’s The Struts, is perfectly honest about his band’s campaign strategy. “Let’s get guitar music back to the top of the charts! Let’s get guitar music back on the radio!” And he knows what he’s shooting for. “We just want to be the biggest band in England really.”
The Struts are Luke, plus guitarist Adam, bass player Jed and drummer Gethin. They met through accident of youthful friendship, but forged together through a shared certainty about what British music was badly needed. Quintessentially English, their music aims as high as their talk is big. They channel the melodies of The Beatles and The Kinks with the theatricality of Queen, shot through with the punk urgency of The Sex Pistols and The Clash, but with a pop sensibility that places them, in spirit, at the top of the 2012 charts. Their songs paint in big, broad strokes, and the only thing more remarkable than aiming that high is that they pull it together so effectively, and from the grassroots. For the last two years they’ve been building as scene as they go, forging friendships and alliances with other bands from the ground up. Now is their time to break cover and enact their masterplan.
Luke does this through putting himself all out there in public. The glam-pop of ‘Kiss This’ is drawn from the unpleasant experience of his best friend sleeping with his girlfriend, but the song comes out the other side as an empowered anthem of defiance. ‘My Machine’ makes a riotous, innuendo-laden banger out of a love song to his car, while the swaggering ‘She Makes Me Feel’ tackles the universal truth of a good date blowing away all the frustrations of day-to-day existence. First out of the traps though, will be debut single proper ‘I Just Know’.
“We want our fans to think,” says Luke on reflection. “They’re really part of something – we’re going to be one of those bands that people argue over. Getting a divided opinion is actually a really good thing for a band.” For sure, as soon as you hear them, The Struts demand to be noticed.
