Those Queen/Mercury comparisons are hard to shake, especially in Spiller’s case. By the time it gets to the skyscraping chorus, he’s rolling his ‘r’s for all he’s worth: ‘ Rrrroll up, rrrroll up, rrrrrrrrrrroll for satisfaction.’ ‘ I’ll welcome you in with Lambrini and gin, the perfect of sins,’ coos singer Luke Spiller, one part Freddie Mercury, one part Robin Askwith. Catchy-as-ebola opening track Roll Up imagines a fantasy Carry On world in which The Struts are bolshy young sultans presiding over a harem of (presumably) dutiful ‘lovelies’. Either way, you’ve gotta hand it to ’em for not giving the slightest of fucks.īut then self-belief is clearly not an issue here. Roger Manning - one half of Jellyfish’s creative double-act with Andy Sturmer – said that they were aiming for a sound “somewhere between Queen and the Patridge Family” and if they didn’t fit in the grunge years, their the boho-psychedelic look and finely-tooled classicism meant you could file them with retro-spirits of the time like the Black Crowes and World Party.Įverybody Wants (or as it appears on the cover, Everybody Wants… The Struts – geddit?) is an unashamed old school rock’n’roll album, which, given mainstream culture’s current disdain for guitars makes The Struts either the bravest or stupidest young band out there.
Debut album for you full#
Released in 1990, Bellybutton was 10 vibrant songs stuffed full of wit and invention, with the pop sheen you’d expect from a record produced by Albhy Galuten, the guy who had recorded the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever. Their tragedy was that the band surfaced at the point when the music business swam into the darker, gloomier waters of grunge, and Jellyfish were doomed to drift out of time and place.
The best of these sounded like smash hits from the two previous decades that had somehow escaped the collective memory. Formed in 1989 and inspired by the music they’d discovered on FM radio while growing up in 70s suburban California – The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, ELO, 10cc, Fleetwood Mac, Wings and more – Jellyfish’s debut album was packed with wondrous pop-rock songs, labyrinthine harmonies, soaring string arrangements and melodies as evocative as a Californian sunrise.
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