The Struts
photo by Carmen O'Hagan
On their second visit to Atlanta, British rockers The Struts sat down with Chattanoogan.com for a quick Q&A on the topic of rock music’s future.
The four-piece band from Derby, Derbyshire, England is comprised of frontman Luke Spiller, guitarist Adam Slack, bassist Jed Elliot, and drummer Gethin Davies. Playing anywhere and everywhere that they can, the rockers are disciplined and united to accomplish a simple mission - to conquer the world.
You can catch The Struts as they come through Nashville to play Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival on Saturday, September 24.
Chattanoogan: You had the honor of closing out 2015 with Mötley Crüe on their Final Tour. What did each of you learn from that experience?
Luke: I think it was a great opportunity, as a group, to kind of self assess the way we play our set. For instance, we wanted to make each guitar changeover or transition from one song to the next. When you’re playing a level like that you need to be a lot more together as a group. It’s not really like a 500-capacity club gig where you can fall about.
Our own fans were cheering between each song; we had to keep it as punctual as possible, and that’s something I think we’ve learned and I think we’ve carried throughout all of 2016 as of yet. And that’s really, really helped us.
Adam: It’s just really an honor. Knowing who they’ve brought out on tour in the past, like Guns N’ Roses as the biggest example. For them to have us on their last four dates was just a huge honor. It’s nice to be able to play with a band of that caliber; they’re really nice guys and gave us some advice.
Jed: It’s great to be playing big rooms again. We’ve played some in the past and it’s nice to playing in those big arenas. Like Luke said, it just made us step up a level in our performance to make it more slick. Yeah, if we were doing arenas our selves, that the kind of thing we need to step up to. It was a good learning curve and good fun.
Gethin: I was just gonna say that down on the similar lines of just being inspired. I know what we can work towards to better achieve that in playing to our own audience in a venue that size.
Chattanoogan: With all the final tours and farewells of legendary rock bands going on, there seems to be some open space for new groups to stake their claim on the scene. The Struts seem to be the band to do that. What are your thoughts? With your recent success do you feel like the torch is being passed to The Struts? How does that feel and are y’all ready?
Luke: Yeah, I think as we’re trying to come up in the ranks, so to speak, in terms of bands at the moment there is definitely a sense of we’ve been talking the talk and we have to back it up, with you know our songs, performance and most of all our work ethic as well. It’s taken a while for us collectively to realize that just recording the best songs you possibly can sometimes isn’t enough, especially at the stage we’re at now. We want to create relationships with every single station that is supporting us and playing our music and meeting as many fans as possible. That means we have to do twice the amount of work as our contemporaries, and we’re happy to do that, if it means that we have the best chance possible becoming the biggest band in the world.
Jed: I think if you want to be the best, you have to work the hardest. That’s what we intend to do and leave no regret. As long as we put the work in now, hopefully it will pay off in the long term.
Luke: It’s a lovely illusion that a lot of Americans think we’re as big as we are in the UK as we are in the U.S. The fact is, well for instance, we just learned today that we’re doing three shows in the UK – all of which are about to sell out, which is great considering we haven’t really played there for at least 7 months.
Luke: But we consider that to be a bit of a triumph. You know, our strategy since June last year when we signed with Interscope, we want to do everything that we perhaps couldn’t do in the UK and do it in the US. Putting all our focus and energy in The States and gain the creditability and the audience through radio and media and TV performance – things that we’ve never really done in the UK. The idea is to go for the world jugular, which is the States. Then the rest of the world kind of follows.
Jed: Like these guys alluded to we want to be the hardest working band and prove to everyone working with us that we’re working as hard as they are. And if it that means playing a lot of markets that a lot of bands, especially British bands don’t touch – like Johnson City and Little Rock, then we’ll do it.
Chattanooogan: Gene Simmons of Kiss recently suggested in an interview that rock music will eventually die. Do you think there’s any truth in that statement?
Luke: Yeah, if you want to sound like Kiss or Mötley Crüe, or any of the bands from the 70s or 80s then yeah it’s dying. But, are The Struts a rock n’ roll revival group? Perhaps. The way I see it, we’re doing what we’ve wanted to do for a long time, and we’ve worked hard to get here. We’re not here to stand here and say “rock n’ roll is still alive,” because that stuff never really dies. Great music will always live on. We just play what we want; we sound how we want to, and that just happens to be what we sound like. If we loved roots/reggae and that’s exactly what we wanted to sound like and be then that’s what we’d be doing. We didn’t make this band to say let’s bring rock and roll back. As far as I’m concerned, I listen to music everyday and it’s the same stuff I’ve been listening to for over ten years. So rock never dies as long as you keep listening to it.
Chattanoogan: How can The Struts make their mark?
Luke: We have such a busy schedule, that we’re really taking every day as it comes. For instance, here today we’re going to go on stage and do what we always do – try to blow everyone out of the water and win over as many people as we can and put on the best show that we possibly can. You know, I think we live in a universe where talent prevails and hard work pays off. I think if we keep going the way we go, then I’d like to think that we’re going to make our mark; but, you know, it’s a [explitive] up business. We’d be really lucky if we’re still a band, signed to a major label, in five years. You can’t tell. All you can do is take the present and make the most of that. So that’s where we’re at, at the moment. You ask me that question in twelve months and I’ll be able to give you a more decent, solid answer.