Luke Spiller, lead vocalist for British rock band the Struts, remembers the first time he saw the video for Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”
“I remember seeing the coin flip into the jukebox and then the bow, and I was like, whoa, this is so different from anything that I had heard,” he tells me on a virtual call from Los Angeles, where he now lives. “And of course, like the movement—that was the thing that really grabbed me, the dancing; not just from him, but the choreography across the entire video.”
More from Spin:
Lana Del Rey Country LP ‘The Right Person Will Stay’ Due In May
Watch Kendrick Lamar Dance, Read A Book In ‘Squabble Up’ Video
Jackson inspired Spiller to be a dancer. He believed that he was destined to perform at the Royal Ballet. But then he discovered rock acts like AC/DC, Queen, and the Darkness. And we all know how that turned out. “I’ll have to settle for being a rock and roller, I guess,” he says with a smile.
(Credit: Whitney Otte)
The Struts—a name inspired by the way Spiller strutted around a room—formed in Derby, England, in 2012 and became known for their outrageous live shows. Two years before the band put out its first album Everybody Wants in 2014, they opened for the Rolling Stones before a crowd of 80,000 people in Paris and toured in the U.S.
“That was one of the real life-changing moments in our career where we had been really sort of blowing up in France for reasons that at the time we couldn’t quite understand…” says Spiller. “Our performance wasn’t particularly breathtaking. In fact, we had the plug pulled out when we went over by about three minutes. When they took us to the United States…it all created this really healthy bit of synergy that we used to take over to the States. And we’re still sort of feeling it now.”
Since then, the Struts have opened for the Foo Fighters and Guns N’ Roses while selling out shows across the globe and leaving a trail of unbridled rock collections, including Young & Dangerous (2018), Strange Days (2020), and Pretty Vicious (2023) in their wake. The band even has its own podcast, The Struts Life.
On October 25, the Struts released their newest single “Can’t Stop Talking,” a slight departure from the band’s earlier work, and a throwback to the best of mod Brit rock with a very danceable beat.
Is it true that your new single, “Can’t Stop Talking,” was inspired by a Mighty Boosh episode?
Slightly. Every now and then, when you’re in the creative process and you are in little writing rooms and little, tiny studios six days a week, I guess you can get a little bit of cabin fever. I think writers always approach their music quite seriously to begin with, and then once that’s kind of out the way, they then start getting to the more interesting stuff, the things that are a little bit more off the cuff. And that’s what happened with “Can’t Stop Talking.” We just sort of tried something really different. And that section in the song did remind me of the Mighty Boosh episode. I was kind of sold from that moment on. I was like, yeah, that’s great. That’s cool. It has that sort of thing, which is in my eyes, undeniably cool. So I was ready to run with it.
The video looks like it was a lot of fun to shoot.
Yeah, it was great. You hit the nail on the head. When I was thinking along the video and what it was going to be—there’s this great director, Joe [Lynn], who I work with in the United Kingdom on lots of stuff, and he also shoots a lot of stuff for Noel Fielding from The Mighty Boosh as well—so when he heard it [the song] and I sort of told him he completely got it. The whole crew did such an amazing job of staying true to the echoes of London Mod culture, with the dancers based on the early ’60s, like Twiggy and then the movements. They really sort of went in and studied those funny, slightly cheesy dances that used to happen in the day.
We sort of really wanted to keep it light, keep it fun; something that would actually enhance the song, not take it away and be super smart or anything like that. We’re just like, no, let’s just sort of take this bizarre song and put this video on top to really emphasize the sound, the message. I loved that video. That was a really great day. It’s quite funny, the biggest thing that everybody took away from it was where the other two members were. And you know, the truth be told was we were in between two tours and we had this window to work with the person who I wanted to work with, and yeah, the other guys just weren’t going to make it. And there were budgeting issues and everybody was all around different parts of the world, and it was meant to be just myself in the video. And then, last minute, I found out that Adam [Slack] was actually going to be in London, so I was like, “Look, come on, just come on down, get in the video.” He actually forgot his guitar. He left it at his house and flew from LAX to London without a guitar. So there was this whole drama of getting a guitar to him on set. And then, I accidentally told him the wrong day that the video was being shot. So poor Adam had to land at 10:00 in the morning in London, rush back to his hotel, get changed, and then pretty much arrive on set and then shoot till about 7:00 that night. So yeah, it was a fun video, though.
The Struts perform in Milan, October 21, 2024. (Credit: Roberto Finizio/Getty Images)
What was the recording process like?
It started off just as a demo. It was done so quickly and it was very instinctive, very off the cuff. And to be honest, we kind of lived with it for almost a year. And when we were recording Pretty Vicious, our last album, it sat there along with a bunch of other songs. But we felt that we had a particular mission with the album to come back with just a brilliant typical Struts record, to prove to everyone that we can do what we’re best known for. And I felt like “Can’t Stop Talking” was a bit too left of center for the time we were working on the album.
Scott Borchetta from the label would call me up and be like, “Oh, you know, I’m still listening to that ‘Can’t Stop Talking’ song. I absolutely love it.” And we thought, well, what have we got to lose? Let’s pop in and lay it down. So we went into Sunset Sound and we’d already been playing it for about two weeks on tour in the U.S., so between the U.S. tour and the U.K. and Europe, we had about three and a half weeks off. So we pretty much played the last show in L.A. and then took it to the studio really quick, really simple. And then that was it.
Jed Elliott, Luke Spiller, Adam Slack, and Gethin Davies pose backstage on Day 3 of Shaky Knees Festival 2024 at Central Park on May 5, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia.
(Credit: Scott Legato/Getty Images)
But it was an interesting process because we’d never had a rehearsal studio and rehearsed what we were going to play. But we essentially did with “Can’t Stop Talking” because we’d been playing it live. So, we added these little nuances and a few different things that were very different from the demo, which definitely gave it some life and it also made it more unique as well. So Gethin’s [Davies] drum fill for instance; that big sort of mini solo, that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been rehearsing it at soundcheck and then playing it live in front of people. And I tell you what, it was really amazing. As soon as we started playing it, I’d teach the audience the little hook, the “oohs” in the chorus, and the whole place every night would just go absolutely mental for it. So, whether it’s sort of going to be rubbing shoulders along Sabrina Carpenter and Chappelle Roan, I highly doubt it. But in terms of our fanbase, they absolutely loved it. So that’s all that matters.
Tell me about the song’s lyrics. Are they based on personal experiences? Do you have an issue with talking too much?
Yeah, it’s really funny. I guess I might be giving you an exclusive, but nobody’s caught onto the fact that it was about a cokehead. When you do that drug…you can tell someone who’s on it and they just absolutely start chewing your ear off. And that was essentially what the song’s about. Autobiographical? In many ways, yes. But it’s also still quite character-driven at the same time. It’s quite funny no one’s caught onto that, and everyone keeps thinking it’s about drinking. But then as soon as you understand that and you read through the lyrics, “This is my new best friend, but when the morning comes I’ll never see them again” and all these things like, “Yeah, we should do this”…and then you wake up the next morning and you either never call them back or they never call you back. And it’s all just chatting about absolute rubbish, basically. So, that was kind of the premise of the song.
October 21, 2024 in Milan. (Credit: Elena Di Vincenzo/Archivio Elena Di Vincenzo/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)
I can relate, though not from the cocaine perspective. I just get awkward sometimes. When I’m talking to people and I’m nervous, I either don’t talk much or I talk way too much.
I think that’s the whole point sometimes with songwriting. If you take a subject that’s very precise and personal to you, if you toe the line lyrically just in the right way, you’re sort of expressing all of these things that align with your experience in your mind. You’re like, I know what this is about. But if it’s done the right way, it applies and can be related to loads of different things. I mean, you’re not wrong. I started getting floods of messages of course, like when it came out and they would be everything from “This is like my theme song” to “My husband always says I can’t stop talking,” or like to kids at school who are getting in trouble because they can’t stop yapping when teachers try to tell them something. So it is sort of like this weird universal message, you know?
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.