The Struts Plot British Invasion and Brought the House Down at Dallas Show

A small Freddie Mercury Funko Pop stands guard on the top of Luke Spiller’s upright piano, like a patron saint of theatrical glam rock, as Spiller, lead singer of British rock band The Struts, plays the opening melody to a stripped-back version of “Young Stars.” The band has re-imagined the song for the 10th anniversary tour of their debut album, Everybody Wants, taking the bleeding-heart anthem from its original blow-your-house-down volume and grandeur to a softer, acoustic ballad shot through with yearning.

“Oh young star, you’re famous / You strut around shameless / We love you, don’t hate us / ‘Cause you won’t forget us,” Spiller belts.

The packed crowd inside The Echo Lounge sings along with every word, as they do for every song on the evening’s set list. The drunk older women who were trying to fight each other between Dirty Honey’s opening set and the main act even simmered down, fully captivated under the music’s spell. One woman leans in close, half draped over the barricade and breathes a dreamy sigh, watching guitarist Adam Slack play on the far end of the stage. “God, he’s so beautiful,” she says. “Don’t you just want to touch his hair?” The fanbase is certainly dedicated, as it is diverse.

For Struts fans who have watched the band’s trajectory over the last decade, this emotional rendition of “Young Stars” makes you want to reach back in time and tell those young rockstars, “Honey, you are loved.” The song was written during a period from The Struts’ early history when the band was fighting tooth and nail for recognition, self-assured of their own talent and showmanship at a time when it felt like the most apathetic music fans bemoaning, “Rock is dead,” might’ve been right.

Could Have Been Me

One of the first, and only, U.S. radio stations to embrace the band was Alt 104.5 Philadelphia, a station I personally worshipped at the altar of during interminably long summer lifeguarding shifts at a community pool in my central New Jersey hometown. Someone from the neighborhood had taken pity on us, bored teenage lifeguards and set up a radio system for us so we could pass the time a little more easily with music. Our radio system got reception through wires we’d wrapped around a piece of metal broken off the shaft of a pool skimmer that needed to balance just right to get clear sound.

I was cleaning the pool one day when I heard this massive voice come bursting through the speaker I had balanced on a bucket of granulated chlorine: “Don’t want to live as an untold story / Rather go out in a blaze of glory / I can’t hear you, I don’t fear you.”

I dropped what I was doing and booked it to the radio so I could turn up the volume. “Who is that​?” I said. I was astonished that there was still a band putting out this kind of larger-than-life anthem. At work, I vascilated between 104.5 and some NYC-based classic rock radio stations to get my heavy guitar fix, as I thought real, hard rock music was confined to a past era I had missed out on. Disenchanted with what I felt was shallow music dominating the Top 40, I had internalized older people from the neighborhood constantly telling me, “They don’t make music like they used to.”

In 2015, just as “Could’ve Been Me,” the lead single off Everybody Wants (which was recently re-imagined and re-released with none other than Sir Brian May from Queen), was starting to break through in the U.S., the presence of rock music on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was downright ghostly. Hozier was breaking through to stardom following the popularity of “Take Me to Church,” and Walk the Moon was having their moment with “Shut Up and Dance.” Fall Out Boy was back on the map at the time with a couple of big hits on their second post-hiatus album, American Beauty/American Psycho, but even those giants of the early 2000s emo scene were experimenting with more of a pop and synth-driven sound. If you were a kid discovering rock music for the first time and on the hunt for contemporary acts still writing music with drums, bass and electric guitar, 2015 felt like a dismal time.

The Struts Found Their People in America

That is, until The Struts busted down the door with a debut album that’s “all killer, no filler,” as Spiller described it in an interview before the show. While the U.K. was sleeping on the band, American audiences welcomed them with open arms. Spiller puts this down to America being more of a land of opportunity and variety, the sheer size of our media landscape dwarfing the U.K.’s only three main radio stations and singular music chart.

“In America, not only do you have more regional radio, which has way more accessibility for no matter what genre you’re in,” Spiller says. “So as long as [the music’s] quality, you can you can find your people.”

Rock and roll is only as dead as you want it to be. Spiller says there’s a reason “Could’ve Been Me” still gets 130,000 streams a day.

“Let’s be honest, it’s every group’s dream, whether you’re from the U.K. or Europe or anywhere like that, to get a fan base in the United States. It just is because the Europe and the United Kingdom, whether they want to admit it or not, they still look to America, and we’ve always had this really symbiotic relationship where we’re constantly kind of doing this kind of call and response between our two nations.”

Though bassist Jed Elliot theorized on the band’s weekly podcast, The Struts Life, Americans are more appreciative of guitar-based music because of our long-standing country music traditions. If that’s the case, then it would add an extra layer of meaning to the energy the crowd brought to Friday’s show. A Struts concert is not a spectator sport; it’s a fully participatory experience where the crowd and the band feed off each other in equal measure. The audience leans in, almost holding a collective breath in awe as Slack absolutely shreds a guitar solo for at least a good ten minutes. Unfortunately, the Observer is not able to provide an exact time length for Slack’s solo because time lost all meaning. A seven-year-old boy sitting on his father’s shoulder towards the middle of the pit watches with starry eyes like one imagines onlookers watched Jimi Hendrix play the National Anthem on electric guitar at Woodstock.

Spiller notices the boy later in the set and says, “Welcome to the family, mate.”

The Struts are playing the whole record front to back on this tour, bringing back songs that haven’t been on the set list for the last nine years. Segueing into one of the album’s bouncier tracks, “She Makes Me Feel Like,” Spiller recounts playing that song in the band’s early days to just one man and his German shepherd at a pub back home in England.

“It is a really wonderful moment to play that song again,” Spiller says. “And there are a lot more people than one man in his dog.”

See more photos from Friday’s show: