Luke Spiller is the king of rock’n’roll in his world-dominating band The Struts. But with a Lana Del Rey-inspired itch to branch out and do something totally different, on his debut solo album Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes And Wine he’s putting himself out there in a whole new way…
In the search for the new James Bond, you could do worse than Luke Spiller. Charming, classy, achingly British and possessed of a knowing, Martini-dry wit, not to mention a natural way with a Savile Row fit, should the producers wish to go back to 007’s eyebrow-arching Roger Moore golden era, he’s ready-made.
And if they decide that The Struts’ flamboyant vocalist – a man who nightly sings the line ‘Sex so good it makes the neighbours smoke a cigarette’ – is a bit too fun and Austin Powers to be a successor to Daniel Craig’s gritty take on the role, he can at least offer them a theme song. Already has, in fact. Twice.
Back in 2019, Luke wrote a pair – Devil In Me and Angel Like You, both swimming in the lush splendour of the biggest Bond themes – as contenders for 2021’s No Time To Die. There’s even a swell of strings perfect for parachuting off a mountain on skis to.
“I’ve always adored the Bond themes,” he grins. “All the stuff like Shirley Bassey doing Goldfinger, or Carly Simon doing Nobody Does It Better from The Spy Who Loved Me. I just love that sound. I’ve always felt a natural affinity to that type of song.”
In the event, the assignment went to Billie Eilish. But it all began working its way into bigger questions that had been playing on his mind: “If Luke Spiller was a solo artist, how does that look? How does that feel?”
It’s a question he’s been working on answering ever since, finally answered with his debut solo album, the elegant and cinematic Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes And Wine. Knowingly “ditching the glam rock stuff I’m known for”, it still carries with it a sense of Bowie’s sparkle, but is also, he says from his apartment in LA, “a love letter to Scott Walker and Nick Cave and Serge Gainsbourg”, bathed in a more loungey, nighttime vibe than The Struts, often lifted by a 20-piece orchestra. It’s romantic rock’n’roll goes to classic Tinseltown.
“The vibe I was going for was early-’60s London, Carnaby Street meets Paris,” Luke explains. “A lot of the songs come from poetry as well, they’re pretty vulnerable. I adore Lana Del Rey, and I was like, ‘There’s no male artists out there that I can think of that could be the male equivalent of that.’ That got me really excited. It became my North Star for the record.”
In The Struts, Luke Spiller has already won. Over two and a half million people listen to his band every month, while their biggest banger, Could Have Been Me, has clocked up a quarter of a billon streams on Spotify. In America, the Derby-based band are a hit, The Stones in a younger skin. At the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in 2022, the singer took to the stage to front no less a band than Queen.
But still, having done a pair of songs in a style so dear to his heart, he started to wonder if there were more threads on which he should pull.
“I began to really think about my life and my career,” he says. “And I sort of said to myself, ‘I think there’s more to this world musically than just these two songs [for the Bond film].’”
This percolated during the second year of COVID, far from the glamour of Los Angeles where Luke currently resides, or swinging London, in the Devon seaside town of Dawlish. He recalls a “particularly incredible” summer, living in a rented cottage with a piano and a guitar, and a stunning run of weather lining up nicely with pub beer gardens re-opening. With a question mark still hanging over music, our very English chap adjusted to his new environment away from the road quite nicely. “I was truly living the retired lifestyle. I joined the Dawlish bowls team – I won the triples in a tournament!”
Curiosity from his fellow bowlers about what a young man was doing with quite so much free time on his hands, even in a pandemic, eventually led to revealing his secret identity as an international man of rock. “I became the token rock star mascot of Dawlish Bowling Club,” he grins, adding that he now occasionally heads over to Beverly Hills for a throw when he can. Bowling also helped with the creative process. No, really.
“Writing, you almost whip yourself into submission, to the point where you begin to not finish anything. Then I would walk to the bowling green from my cottage, and it allowed me shut my brain off for three hours of the day. I would then be walking home after the game, and I’d stop off at the pub and have a cheeky pint, and ideas would start coming. When I got home, I’d feel even more inspired.”
A poet by nature, Luke says that the songs mainly began life as writings in his notebook. When it came to building them into a record, he wanted to be far more honest than possibly he had been in the past, while operating on a vague concept of love, told through the eyes of a young man moving to LA and falling in love with its glitter and razzle.
“I wanted to make an album completely based on my authentic experiences with love and heartbreak and everything in between,” he says. “I’m at a point in my life where I’ve seen the world twice over, I’ve had some great relationships, not so great relationships, and I thought I could authentically document that.”
How did that feel after so long being the big, flamboyant, good-time guy who embodies The Struts’ songs?
“I mean, there’s a couple of moments that don’t really paint me in the best light,” Luke admits. “The Ending Is Always The Same, which is talking about a very difficult – some would say toxic – situation, but it’s completely from the heart and true and honest.
“Then there’s I’m With Her, But In Love With You. I’ve played it live, and it really gets people, it kind of triggers them. They’re like, ‘I love it, but I absolutely fucking hate it at the same time, because I hate to be that person, that girl, that you’re talking about.’ So, yeah, it gets me a little bit nervous – ‘Gosh, maybe I shouldn’t have been that honest’ – but I’m really proud as well.
“It’s ironic: the more personal you are and the more you dig out of yourself, those tend to be the most universally understood things. It’s quite bizarre.”
In hindsight, there’s an unintentionally tender element to the album as well, on Angel Like You, one of the Bond tracks, which features Taylor Hawkins on drums. Brilliantly, it’s become a salute to his friend.
“He was all for the idea of me trying to get a Bond film, so he lent himself to the song,” Luke remembers. “We cut the drums at his house at the time, and he was super excited about it. More recently, in a completely beautiful, full-circle moment, I actually shot the video for that song at the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606. Taylor’s son, Shane Hawkins, plays in the video on his dad’s kit. I also got a couple of Taylor’s nearest and dearest to appear in the video, along with a couple of my nearest and dearest. So it was a really mixed emotion, full-circle moment.”
Luke says that heading into solo world is “the beginning of a new journey”. For those worrying about what this means for The Struts, fear not. It’s just that someone like Luke can’t do one thing for too long.
“It’s been 15 years with The Struts, and I’d love to be able to break away from it every now and then to sing my own music and have my own audience,” he says. “I think it will make me appreciate the band in a whole new way. To be honest, it already has.”
He may have been pipped to the Bond job – and, incidentally, he feels no shame or bitterness at being beaten by a champ like Billie Eilish – but you sense that doesn’t matter much. Would have been nice, but what’s emerged is, he says more than once, a labour of love, an itch scratched to a degree that it’s run away with him and become more than possibly intended when he was whistling ideas on the way home from bowls.
“I think about this whole chapter now, and I’m so excited. I hope people like it, but for me, as a songwriter and a musician, seeing this thing through to the end, having to chip away at it, feels so good.
“It’s crazy: these songs I began in the countryside in Devon, at my piano, and then all of a sudden I’m in Los Angeles, and there’s 20 string players playing this incredible score…
“Fucking hell,” he laughs. “How the fuck did I manage to pull this off?”
However he did it, mission accomplished.
Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes And Wine is due out on April 25 via Big Machine Rock.
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