photo: Joseph Lynn

“It is obviously evident to me that a lot of the hardcore fans of my group like that super-androgynous, covered-in-glitter, outrageous Luke. But in many ways… I had grown out of it, in the best way, and I was ready to move on,” muses Struts frontman Luke Spiller, tastefully kitted out in a natty waistcoat, slacks, and only a hint of eyeliner, rakishly reclining onstage at the Sunset Strip’s tony Sun Lounge — a stage he has graced many times, as the star vocalist of Bowie pianist Mike Garson’s many sold-out nightclub residencies.

Spiller is discussing his stunning debut solo album, Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes and Wine, the audacious title of which reflects the ambition and emotion held within. It’s a years-in-the-making project (“I can’t even begin to stress how much the odds were against myself and the producers and everyone involved just to get this album across the fucking finish line,” he confesses) and a literal labor of love, in all love’s forms. He’s so excited about the album that before he took the stage, he spent an hour cupping his ear to the door of his Sun Rose dressing room, listening as it was played in full publicly for the first time for 150 invited fans at his private record release party.

Thankfully, those fans certainly seem very accepting of this older, wiser, and gentler Spiller — who, after more than a decade of grinding and touring constantly with rockers the Struts, had found himself in a “creative rut” and feeling like “the last thing I wanted to do was just hear electric guitars.” He spent his downtime listening to mostly classical music and singer-songwriters, writing poems, and “swimming in Scott Walker albums.” The first two symphonic solo songs emerging from this era of soul-searching were so impressive, Spiller actually pitched to them to be the next James Bond theme — and that wasn’t at all a stretch. The Bond thing didn’t happen, but Spiller was inspired, and there was no turning back.

“One of the things that became quite apparent to me was, looking back on my career and the tracks I’d done with the band, I just thought to myself, ‘Maybe I could sort of explore the idea of being a lot more sincere and honest,’” Spiller explains.

LWPKMBC&W began in 2019 — the year that the Bristol-born, Devon-raised Spiller, who jokes that he spent much of his youth “in the countryside talking to farm animals,” permanently moved to Los Angeles and experienced all the culture-shock and awe that the city has to offer. The record, which Spiller quietly “chipped away” at between Struts commitments, eventually took shape as a sort of classically noirish L.A. concept album. He worked with producer Jon Levine (whose credits include Sabrina Carpenter, Suki Waterhouse, Benson Boone, Dua Lipa, and the Struts themselves) and bona fide L.A. legend Jason Falkner (Jellyfish, the Grays, Beck, St. Vincent, Air, the Three O’Clock, Kommunity F.K.), who Spiller cute-met on a plane when he was traveling to London to perform with Queen at his late friend Taylor Hawkins’s Wembley memorial concert. Spiller’s friendship with Hawkins began when the Struts toured with the Foo Fighters — Dave Grohl once famously declared the Struts the best opening act the Foos ever had — and Hawkins actually drummed on LWPKMBC&W’s closing track, “Angel Like You.” The emotional, full-circle new music video for that song features Hawkins’s son, Shane.

As Spiller quietly created these 10 tracks of piano balladry, he came to the conclusion that they would not fit into the Struts’ world — where the music would likely be “a hard sell” to his bandmates, and his moodboard-assisted “strong vision” would get “put through sort of the meat-grinder of expectations” and become “diluted.” And so, after the promotional cycle for the Struts’ fourth album, Pretty Vicious, was completed, he let his bandmates know about his secret solo project. Spiller admits there were some “growing pains” when his fellow Struts realized he was “not always going to be 100 percent dedicated to the group full-time,” but they eventually understood that he “needed to step away in order to step back into the group dynamic more inspired and more driven.”

The Struts are still very much an actively working band — “It’s not like I’m not turning up!” Spiller quips, as he looks ahead to a packed calendar that includes the Struts’ performances at the Beachlife Festival and on Def Leppard’s/Mötley Crüe’s Rock the Tides cruise, a big tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Struts’ landmark first album, and of course, new Struts music. But the self-described “busy bee” is also “more inspired than ever to just get back in and create a wonderful follow-up” to Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes and Wine, and who knows — maybe he’ll even end up singing a Bond theme for real one day.

The following is a Q&A between Spiller and myself, conducted at his record release party at the Sun Rose on April 23.

LYNDSANITY: Congrats on the new album! It’s very epic, like a whole album of James Bond themes. Anyone working within the James Bond movie franchise should give you a call.

LUKE SPILLER: I actually had “Devil in Me” and “Angel Like You,”  the opening and closing tracks on the album, since 2019 — when I did pitch them for the Bond film. I believe it was No Time to Die that year.

Someone named Billie Eilish got the gig that year.

Yeah, but you know what? It was really good, because it just kind of goes to show if you are feeling something, no matter how ambitious it may be or sort of completely unreachable, it’s great as an artist just to at least go there in your mind — even take it a step forward and full-on record it, just for the pure love of it. Because of course I didn’t get it, but it did begin this journey and became the nucleus, basically, for me exploring this different side to myself. And I would then sort of really go down the rabbit-hole of what else could I do in this sort of world and how I could expand on it. And that literally became a 10-track album.

I was semi-joking when I made that Bond remark, but I didn’t know about this actual theme-song pitch process you did.

It kind of almost goes back to when I just got off the road with the Foo Fighters and I was working with the Struts in the Foos’ studio. Long story short, one of the engineers there worked for the film studio and we hit it off really, really well, and he mentioned that his dad worked for a lot of the studios that did all those Bond films. So, that kind of got my cogs going in my brain. I thought, “OK, well I could probably do this.” What was really cool about that particular time is the closing track “Angel Like You,” the sister song to “Devil in Me,” I wanted it to be more of a typical Bond track, and I knew it was going to have a real rock edge to it. So, I called my mate at the time, Taylor Hawkins, and we ended up going to his house and he cut the drums on it. And what’s really unique and special is the video, which drops the day that the album comes out, I knew I wanted to do something special to sort of further pay my respect and sort of see it through to the end. I called up the engineer at the Foos’ studio and I said, “I’m thinking about shooting a video for ‘Angel Like You.’ I think it would be a full-circle moment to do it at this specific studio.” And I also got Taylor’s son, Shane, to play on his dad’s kit, playing over his dad’s part. I also built the band with a few of his other friends that I’d met through him. It was just a really surreal but beautiful experience for it to go completely full-circle.

How amazing. This album has clearly been quite a long time in the making. I understand it also started from a book of poetry or poems that you wrote. I’d love to know about that process.

To be honest, a lot of it kind of started during lockdown. I had those two tracks and I was living with them for quite some time, and I was really inspired to keep going down that rabbit-hole, so to speak. I was renting a cottage in the countryside in the U.K. [during the pandemic], and I had a piano and a guitar, and like many musicians in that time, I had so much time to self-reflect. And one of the things that became quite apparent to me was, looking back on my career and the tracks I’d done with the band, I just thought to myself, “Maybe I could sort of explore the idea of being a lot more sincere and honest.” And that led me to want to create an album solely just on my experiences with relationships and not deviate from that. I knew very early on I didn’t want to make a party song. It was literally all going to be about love and heartbreak and everything in between — the good, the bad, and whatever else. I didn’t want to deviate from that. And lyrically, a lot of the songs were kind of written backwards, where I would sit and I would write maybe four or five verses or fancy lyrics, poetry, whatever you want to call it, and I’d sort of just chip away at it to a point where I could read them back and I’d be like, “Wow, that’s really nice to read.” In the same way as poems do, they sort of roll off the tongue and they’re filled with imagery. It’s a completely different way of working from what I’d done before, almost like Elton [John] and Bernie [Taupin].

Except you had to be both of them!

Yeah, essentially. I’d have to sort switch heads every now and then! But it made for a really good creative exercise, and as a result… I have to say, the lyrical content on this record is so much richer and more thought-out and precise than things that I’ve done before. I’m just really excited for everyone else to soak it all up.

You mentioned the vivid imagery, and it seems like a lot of the songs are very specific, like maybe about very specific dates you went on or encounters you had. And many have the backdrop of Los Angeles, your second home. There’s “She’s Just Like California,” a song called “Magic at Midnight at Mel’s Diner,” and the line “hold me like Hollywood held you” in the title track. This seems like a very L.A. album to me — almost a love letter to L.A. Or maybe a love/hate letter.

It’s funny, because I never intended to make a concept album. But once I had started to build the body of work, I listened and thought, “Oh my, I’ve sort of unconsciously created a record that really talked about when I moved to L.A. and as a British person, what that’s like.” And then finding myself in love, finding myself out of love, dealing with that, going through all of that amongst this kind of iconic scenery all around me. In some ways, it very much is sort of like a love/heartbreak/Los Angeles concept record. I wouldn’t be able to call it a “love letter” as such, because it’s got a lot of ebbs and flows and there’s a lot of love and there’s a lot of pain as well amongst it. It’s a series of tracks that are sort of documenting my experience through my eyes, essentially being an alien.

When you moved here in 2019, did you have a preconception about L.A. or the mythology about California? And how much of the reality lived up to that, or contrasted with that?

That’s a good question. … I feel a lot of English people come here with eyes filled stars and whatnot, and this is my experience and my opinion, but I think when you first get here, sometimes it’s a bit of a rite of passage to get swallowed up into it. Because there’s always something to do. There’s always somebody to see. There’s always a new experience around the corner. And when you come from the United Kingdom and you spend most of the time in the countryside talking to farm animals and whatnot. … I mean, we get everything from movies. I’m a massive sort of music documentary junkie, so any sort of group that was based in L.A. or California, I would dive into that. And even more recent artists as well, like  Lana Del Rey, for instance — I enjoyed the hits, but when I moved here properly, when Norman Fucking Rockwell came out, I was like, “Wow, this all really makes sense to me now,” seeing it. It’s the same with the Beach Boys, like, “Oh, I get it. I really get it.” It was a really eye-opening experience, and evidently an incredibly inspiring one as well.

I have to ask you about the album’s very poetic title.

It was a phrase that I had from a bunch of verses that I’d written. When I went in to record [the title track] with Jon Levine, I knew it was a completely bombastic and ridiculous title. And I’ve always enjoyed stupid, pretentious titles. But I thought that phrase was the right side of a thin line of being really meaningful and authentic, and then also a bit like, “Yeah, I just said that!” When the song started coming through the speakers, I knew straight away this was the message and the phrase that perfectly encapsulated the whole album and the whole vibe of it.

I know when you were making the record, you actually had a “moodboard.” It had photos of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, Scott Walker, a very young Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Mick Jagger in the ‘60s, Face magazine covers from the early ‘90s. Tel me about all this imagery and pop-culture references that were inspiring you.

Well, during that time when I was writing the songs, I was asking myself in terms of my image, what is it going to be? And it is obviously evident to me that a lot of the hardcore fans of my group like that super-androgynous, covered-in-glitter, outrageous Luke. But in many ways, by that time I had grown out of it, in the best way, and I was ready to move on. And I was swimming in Scott Walker and all of his albums at the time. I just became really inspired by that, because it sort of represented to me everything that I wanted to be as a solo artist. It was reminiscent of the early ‘60s, that typical male singer-songwriter alone on the stage, dressed really well, still has a lot of style and a huge amount of presence, but they’re the kind of artists that don’t need to be galloping all over the stage and sweating buckets. Not like I don’t enjoy that, but there’s a time and a place for it. And even the way I’d sung for most of my career up until that point, it’s always been the same thing. Everybody wants me [very high] in my range where it’s at my absolute limit, and yeah, sure, it sounds great, but I knew that I wanted to create an album which was filled with sincerity and storytelling and whatnot. So, I knew that I was going to have to use a lot more of my range than just up here all the time, because it is hard to convey a heartfelt song about love or heartbreak when you’re screaming at the top of your lungs. You need to come down.

I feel like another one of the biggest inspiring aspects of this album was I was sort of looking at the musical climate and I couldn’t think of any male solo artists that had a real depth to their lyric. And it sort of made me think, “OK, well, who did?” So, I started looking at and listening to Dylan and Scott and Leonard — they were kind of my father, son, and holy spirit for a while. And of course, even more so, the female singer-songwriters. I was just completely soaking them all up and then sort of churning these songs out … A lot of Joni Mitchell fans will hate me for this, but I love the reworked record that she did with the big orchestra where she revisited the songs. I like her early stuff as well, but that one in particular was a big inspiration, because it showed me that you can have such powerful lyrics, but yet this huge accompaniment around you. That heavily inspired the production and the string arrangements on this album.

I’m curious to talk more about your image evolution. I know there are some Struts fans that have complained when the band deviated from something that was straight-up “rock,” like when the Struts collaborated with Robbie Williams or Kesha or Paris Jackson. Some fans won’t accept that artists can do and try different things. How you feel the Struts’ fanbase will react to this solo record? Will they understand and appreciate what you’re trying to do?

I mean, in the nicest way possible and with the utmost respect, I really think it’s important for an artist to not think about their audience too much. If Bowie had done that, he would’ve carried with everything Ziggy. He would’ve never have done Station to Station or Young Americans. You have to evolve, and all of my heroes just push forward. The thing that matters the most is if you’re going to do it, then just do it properly. If you’re going to go somewhere, go all the way and mean it. Changing for the sake of it, I think, is dangerous, but if you feel like you are changing and different things are inspiring the moment, do it. … When you start to write music to cater to an existing fanbase, I think you just become boring, and ironically, I think the fans eventually become bored too.

Was there ever a moment where you thought these songs that became your solo album could have just been on a Struts album instead?

The honest answer is yes, but I had such a strong vision of the sonics and the way that my songs were going to be approached. What kind of happens when you’re in a band situation is that you could write a song on the piano and be like, “This is the way it should be,” but you then insert that into a group of three to four other individuals and it gets put through sort of the meat-grinder of expectations, where everyone’s saying, “What do you mean it’s just going to be piano? Where’s my guitar solo?” And that’s fine. And sometimes that works and sometimes that collaboration is what makes a band great. But I knew in my heart of hearts that there was a certain way to present this music and I was going to have an extremely tough time convincing everyone. “Al right, boys, sit down…”

“Here’s the moodboard…”

Yeah. “Have you ever heard of Scott Walker? I want to do a piano-based album mainly of ballads. It’s going to have 20-piece string-section accompaniment.” It would’ve been a bit of a hard sell. My dad comes up with cracking analogies, it’s quite funny, and he said, “Sometimes when you try to create a racehorse by committee, you end up with a camel.” And it’s true. If you have a really strong vision about something, by the time that your immediate people get involved around you, your vision gets diluted. And then bit by bit, it becomes something that you never intended and you’re left wondering, “What if I just saw that through to the end?” And this album in many ways was me doing that, but at the right time.

Why was this the right time to go solo?

I think if have done this after Struts album one or two, it would’ve been a bit too early and inappropriate. But I made it my mission to show the band when we were doing our last record. I wasn’t even going to talk about any of this [solo] music [with them], to be quite honest. It was already recorded for the most part while we were doing the fourth [Struts] album. But I wanted to show everyone where my heart was, and that I wasn’t giving up on anything, and that I wanted to give Pretty Vicious my absolute all. And I did. And then once that had been done and it was out, I then said, “By the way, this is something that I’ve been working on, that I feel really passionate about. I want to put it out there.”

Did you really keep it under wraps for a while?

I did! I didn’t want to muddy the waters, and I didn’t want one of my midtempo ballads to be track eight [on a Struts album] competing against nine hard rock songs — because then those [ballads] are just sort of moments, and they don’t become singles. Do you know what I mean? So, I quietly chipped away at it, and then obviously told everyone and presented it.

What was their reaction?

I mean, it wasn’t easy for everyone. Think about it: When you’ve been in a group for 15 years, it’s all sort of one mission and one vision. It’s a little bit of growing pains when one person then turns around and says, “Hey, I want to also stretch myself out a bit and sort of dip into different areas.” It’s a tough thing to come grips with that. I’m not always going to be 100 percent dedicated to the group full-time, but like I said, after 15 years, it’s like, can you blame me? Do you know what I mean? And it’s not like I’m not turning up!

In general, was the band understanding of why you wanted to do this, even if it took them a moment to accept it or process it?

Yeah, ultimately everyone was like, “Great!” I sort of explained to everyone, “Look, I’m in a real creative rut when it comes to rock music.” Especially at the time, when I was really inspired to do these songs, the last thing I wanted to do was just hear electric guitars. I’m being real here. I was just so sick of it after so long and being on tour constantly. I would come home and listen to classical music and singer-songwriters. I needed to step away in order to step back into the group dynamic more inspired and more driven. And now, finally this thing that I’ve been working on is going to be out there, and I’m hoping it’s going to reinspire me to come back and start working with the guys in a more healthy way.

Have you played this album for them? I’m very curious to know what they thought of it.

Let’s just say it’s not top of the conversation all the time, but in the best way possible, because we’ve got a lot of things coming up. We’re working on new music. We are at a really crucial point in our career… obviously, because it’s the 10-year anniversary of the debut album. There may or may not be sort of discussions of having a repackaged version. I’ll just let your imagination run wild on that, about what that will entail. But it’s going to be a really special sort of moment and it’s going to be a really great tour. So yeah, of course it’s not like they’re all high-fiving me about this record. We’ve got shit to do.

So, I assume on the upcoming Struts tour, you won’t be playing any solo material.

I think it’s healthy at this point to have a bit of healthy separation from it. But the truth is, I’d really love to get out there and tour this record, build a great band and get out there.

Along with working with Jon Levine, one your other collaborators on this album, on “She’s Just Like California” and “The Sound of Love,” is Jason Falkner. How did you two meet?

When everyone in the States got the call to do the Taylor Hawkins tribute show at Wembley, they flew us all out of LAX, and I was the only Brit on that plane. And I was sat next to Jason. We drank all the way there and we were just chatting, and neither of us knew who the hell we were. It was really sweet. I don’t think he’d ever heard of my band, because he’s too cool for me! I obviously I knew of Jellyfish. But we just really hit it off. He was a really sweet bloke, and I remember playing him a couple of my songs and of course we hung out. I was giving him so much shit — I don’t know if you know this, but he kind of looks like the dead ringer for Jon Bon Jovi. We’d be at a restaurant and the waitress would come over in London when we were there for the whole week and ask if we needed any drinks, and I’d say, “Do you know who the fuck this is? We’re having free drinks! This is Jon Bon Jovi!” And he would get so pissed off about that. [laughs]

I mean, if you get free drinks out of it…

But we stayed in touch. And then when everything was said and done and we all ended up back in L.A, I started to drop into the studio with him. That’s essentially how this whole record was made. I would do some work with Jon, and when Jon was busy doing his thing, I would see if Jason was available. I was sort of going between the two of these amazingly, incredibly talented people, and it just made for such an amazing album. I was competing the two of them — they didn’t know about it, but I was sort of thinking, “I just did this with Jon, and it’s really, really good. Let me see if I can beat that with Jason!” It was a funny thing I could do.

You have obviously shared the stage and the studio with so many cool people in your career. Who’s your dream collaborator?

Right now, I’m not really focused on doing loads of collaborations. I think this whole record experience has been such an education. I can’t even begin to stress how much the odds were against myself and the producers and everyone involved just to get this album across the fucking finish line. When you are juggling two different things, when you’re in a band and you’re doing this and then you’re constantly out on the road and whatnot, it’s tough. I can see why a lot of people will put their groups on hiatus or step away altogether, because it is really tough to have meetings and be approving things, doing the creative, shooting videos. There are 10 music videos going along with this album, by the way! So, I think right now, instead of collaborations, I’m just more inspired than ever to just get back in and create a wonderful follow-up. I already have a bunch of songs in my head, and the Struts are working on new music as well, so I’m a very busy bee.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.