Outside the Columbia club in Berlin, a tour bus pulls up and the Killers fall out, bleary-eyed. “What country are we in?” asks the guitarist Dave Keuning. The answer is met with a shrug. “You could have said we were in Pittsburgh and I wouldn’t have known the difference.”

The Killers are on the final stretch of a 16-week round-the-world tour to promote their debut album, Hot Fuss. They have just driven overnight from Cologne, and are playing one date in Berlin before heading to Amsterdam, London and America. The hard touring is paying off: the record has just turned platinum in Britain and is about to do the same in the US. But the strain is starting to show.

“We’ve been on the road so long I can’t remember what it’s like not to be,” says Keuning, after throwing a rock star tantrum at a pizza kiosk when his slice arrives with whole chillies on. “It’s hard work. People often think we’re arrogant when we’re really just tired.”

If the Killers were arrogant, though, they would have good reason. In just over a year, the Las Vegas foursome have become a triple-Grammy-nominated pop act. The hit-stuffed Hot Fuss shot straight into the British Top Ten last June, while their singles have brought a stardusting of 1980s glitz to the charts.

Live, the Killers are one of the most flamboyant bands in rock; the pearly-toothed singer Brandon Flowers looks like the sort of showman who might stick his head in a lion’s mouth, or start twirling a silver-topped cane at any moment. Behind the razzmatazz, though, are sensitive souls who have more in common with the archetype of the fey British indie band than typical Las Vegas entertainers.

“I was quite a porker when I was younger,” says Flowers. “I never went swimming or anything like that because I didn’t want anyone to see my body. I always assumed that people were looking at me, and if I heard someone laughing while I was in a restaurant it would kill me.”

Depressed by his appearance, Flowers developed a crush on one of his schoolmates, the infamous Andy from Hot Fuss’s tale of stalker obsession, Andy You’re a Star. “I’m not sure I should tell you who Andy is,” he laughs. “He was my friend in eighth grade: a football player and the popular kid. If you’re the loner, there are always going to be people that you want to be, even if it’s just for one day.”

Sexual confusion, loneliness, a lack of athletic ability: it’s not surprising that the Killers feel more kinship with indie music from this side of the Atlantic than American rock. Hot Fuss recalls the smudged-mascara melodrama of the Cure, the desolate romance of Echo and the Bunnymen and the pop pizzazz of Duran Duran, while Flowers sings in what The New York Times calls a “genuine fake British accent”.

“The best bands have always come from England,” says Flowers, who at 23 is five years younger than the rest of his band. “My older brother, Shane, was always watching Smiths videos, and had posters of the Cure on his walls. That’s what I grew up listening to. American stuff such as Korn and Nirvana always sounded like trash to me.”

Given Flowers’s fondness for make-up and his deviant lyrics, it’s surprising that the band bonded over, of all things, a love of Oasis. They formed in 2002 when Keuning placed an advert for bandmates in a local paper, citing the Gallaghers as an influence. At the time, all four had jobs that read like the script of a David Lynch film: Flowers was working as a bellhop at the Gold Coast Hotel, the drummer Ronnie Vannucci was a wedding photographer at the Little Chapel of Flowers (where Britney Spears was married) and Keuning was a shop assistant in a clothes store where, he claims, he used to lure ladies into the changing room for romantic trysts. The reserved bass player, Mark Stoermer, meanwhile, was a courier for a laboratory, transporting boxers’ urine for pre-fight testing.

Their debut single, the synth-spangled Mr Brightside, was written at their very first rehearsal, and, naming themselves the Killers after an imaginary band in a New Order video, they began gigging around Las Vegas, securing a residency at a transvestite bar called Tramps. Their demo was initially turned down by Warners in America, but they soon found an eager listenership across the Atlantic and signed to the British label Lizard King.

“To be honest, I never considered myself part of the local music scene,” says Flowers. “We weren’t trying to write songs better than anyone in the town. I was more worried about the White Stripes and the Strokes.”

Surprisingly for a band who hail from America’s Disneyland of vice, the clean-living Killers aren’t big fans of sin. They do have a taste for the sinister side of life, though, as is shown by the best tracks on the album: the midnight murder tale of Jenny Was a Friend of Mine, and the story of an HIV-positive Studio 54 queen, Natalie. So where do Flowers’s fantasies come from?

“I don’t think I actually want to kill anyone,” he muses. “I guess the closest explanation I can find is Morrissey’s line about ‘the romance of crime’, from The Last of the International Playboys.”

If the most memorable Killers lyrics soundtrack nocturnal snuff movies, the worst are on the cringeworthy Glamorous Indie Rock’n’Roll. Despite its lack of irony, though, the song has become something of an indie-disco anthem, welcomed in Berlin by a rapturous sea of waved hands and lighters.

Most bands would enjoy this kind of adulation, but the Killers seem to need it more than most. “I’m getting better at not being myself,” Flowers says. “Because I’m not the most secure person in the world, on a night when we play a bad gig I’m very conscious if someone walks out of the room or laughs. It’s strange — the bigger the place we play, the more comfortable I feel.”

Happily, the clutch of Grammy nominations has confirmed the Killers’ claim to the stadium stages they are now set to command. “I always feel as though someone is staring at me,” says Flowers. “It means I won’t do certain things. I wouldn’t just sit here naked after a shower, for example. I guess being in a band is a way of trying to turn that paranoia into a positive thing.” He should try to get used to it: as America’s most wanted, the Killers are going to be watched for a while.

The Killers’ new single, Somebody Told Me, is out on Monday. They start their sold-out UK tour at Northumbria University on Jan 19. For more information visit www.thekillers.co.uk

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