Life is often mundane. People get up, they go to work, come home, make dinner, go food shopping, go to the pub. Motions are gone through but are also embroidered with holidays, friends, good food, nice weather. Hidden among these moments are tiny, rare pockets of magic. You almost never see them coming; they drop out of the sky, unplanned or unexpected. Your life in that moment is saturated with joy and consumed by an unshakable certainty of the countless, incredible intricacies and idiosyncrasies which make up the world around us.
I booked tickets to go and see The Struts on a bit of a whim, based on my knowledge of a small handful of songs and the impression that they were the closest modern equivalent to glam rock that we have. We quickly discovered that ‘unreserved standing’ meant ‘unreserved standing, level 2,’ thus removing us from the main floor of the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire. While far from ideal, it did mean there was no queue for the bar.
Eventually, Gethin Davies (drums) walked onstage to the growing cheers of the floors below us. Following closely were guitarist Adam Slack & bassist Jed Elliot. We were subjected to the customary half-minute between the appearance of band and frontman before Luke Spiller strode out. The guy’s like if someone took 1974 Freddie Mercury, 1984 David Lee Roth, the dance moves of Michael Jackson and threw them into the Hadron Collider with a pair of purple flares. There was no time to ease into it – the opening chords of Primadonna Like Me promised a relentless mission to exhaust the audience. Not the sort of exhaustion which leaves you with back ache and a longing to sit down, but the all-encompassing pull at your lungs when you’re told to sing song after song, commanded to dance and jump to every beat, the psychological anticipation of the next chorus which pounds its way through your bloodstream with every stomp of your foot. The feeling of knowing what’s coming and hardly being able to wait for it, but the wait itself is equally glorious. You feel it in the way that your body is made to yearn, react, tremble with expectation and scream with release during really great sex.
The chorus exploded and the audience became an exhilarant, uneven blanket of jumping, flailing limbs. The groove of Body Talks and the chants of I Hate How Much I Want You had the audience as loud as Spiller (disappointingly, Joe Elliott of Def Leppard didn’t make a surprise guest appearance for the latter) but Fire (Part 1) was the light to the blue touch paper inside me. It was the point where I realised that I was slap-bang in the middle of one of those pockets of magic and only had more to look forward to. Without realising it, but not trying to stop it, I found myself crying.
Low Key In Love and Mary Go Round brought the pace down but did nothing to dampen the energy. A mashup which included Put Your Hands Up, Bulletproof Baby and All Dressed Up (With Nowhere To Go) had Spiller punctuating every beat with the sort of razor-sharp pose which stood as a testament to how deeply this music is engrained in him.
Everyone was waiting for the same song when the encore came. Could Have Been Me is their biggest hit and their most anthemic. These songs all have one thing in common in terms of the feelings they evoke; they make you feel like you’re standing at the edge of the world, building and pushing you closer to the brink with every chord progression and melody. Finally, they don’t just push you over the cliff, you’re lifted up and thrown towards the sky. And it keeps going. You soar with every key change, chorus, crescendo. Every time you feel the heart and soul of each member of this band ripping through the music, you go higher.
Never before had I been so desperate for a concert not to end.. Drunk partially on rum and coke, but primarily giddy and full to the brim with joy, the concert energised me rather than tired me. I sprinted across Shepherd’s Bush Green simply to see if it would expel any of the adrenaline coursing through me (it didn’t). I felt weightless with joy.
You should most definitely investigate going to see the Struts if you can. More than that, the sense of joy reverberating around that room, bouncing off the union jack covering the back of the stage and being absorbed by those in the rafters was palpable. The Struts haven’t got the biggest following of any rock band around at the moment, but many of these fans have been going to see the band since they started in the mid-2010s. There’s a sense of near-familial love, and the appreciation radiated from those four musicians.
It wasn’t only a pocket of magic, it felt like a celebration of life and a reminder that it’s what you make it. So, the Struts command, make it good.