LOVE.SEX AND HEARTBREAK

Finally unveiling his first solo album, Struts frontman Luke Spiller mixes classic flavours, velvet-lined pop and old European flair with a modern Hollywood love story.

- Words: Polly Glass

For the past couple of years or so, Luke Spiller has been envisaging certain things for himself. A Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Chart success. Heaps of money. Real love. None of them are vague, empty wishes — a few minutes in Spiller’s company will tell you that he is dead serious about all these, even as he’s able to laugh at himself. More recently, he’s added a Grammy to that list. “I literally look in the mirror and I say: ‘And the Grammy goes to... Luke Spiller’s Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes And Wine,’” he says of his current morning ritual. “It’s a great thing to wake up and say to yourself. It gives you that motivation. I’ll keep doing it and working towards those things.”

It would be easy to dismiss this as the unchecked hubris of yet another puffed up frontman. But Spiller’s tone points to other things: sincere ambition, a healthy degree of self-awareness, an unwavering work ethic.

Today we're talking at 9am West Coast time. Spiller sits in a baggy Harry Potter/'Slytherin' jumper, cigarette in hand, ready to work on a future solo EP and some Struts tunes after our Zoom call finishes. If anyone’s going to ‘manifest’ a Grammy (i.e. in the very 2024 sense of the word - making something a reality through imagination), then it’s probably him.

For now, though, his focus is on his first solo album, Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes And Wine, five years in the making and as grand, emotive, overblown, painstakingly detailed and full of tenderness as that long-winded but incisive title suggests. It speaks of his influences: old Hollywood glamour; Paris in the 1950s; Scott Walker and Jacques Brel. Heartbreak in your early 30s as a newcomer to Los Angeles, in love with someone you can’t not write about.