Las Vegas, Nevada, October 18, 2008. Las Vegas in the credit crunch. To watch
the CNN headlines — all red, plummeting arrows and thundering reports on the
“culprits of the collapse” — you’d think the population of the town that
defines “casino capitalism” would be queuing round the musical fountain for
a cup of powdered milk. But no: what happens in Vegas still happens in
Vegas. Gambling, girls, booze, humungous hotels housing shopping malls
pretending to be ancient Rome.
Outside in reality, though, the cranes overhead are static and construction is
down 20% as emerging, half-built casinos are placed “on hold”. Still,
there’s always plenty here to take your mind off impending unemployment, and
this weekend alone the city hosts several titans of glittering global
showbiz: Donny and Marie, Bette Midler and Jimmy Buffett, the 61-year-old
country-kitsch colossus whose fans, called Parrotheads, wear enormous comedy
sponge parrots on their heads.
Less idiotic but no less colourful, there’s also the biggest band ever to come
from Las Vegas, the Killers, sellers of some 12m albums worldwide, creators
of some of this decade’s most irresistible indie-glam anthems. Their raucous
debut, Hot Fuss (2004), was nominated for five Grammy awards, was No 1 in
the UK and stayed in the top 50 of the American Billboard chart for more
than 50 weeks. Its follow-up, Sam’s Town (2006), saw them win two Brit
awards, for best international group and best international album, and
headline Glastonbury. Their most famous lyrical couplet, “I got soul, but
I’m not a soldier,” has been incorporated into live performances by Bono,
Robbie Williams and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who took to announcing on
stage: “What a great band the Killers are!”
Right now, they’re being driven out to the desert and proving themselves oddly
incongruous characters. Mark Stoermer, bass player/songwriter, the one with
the hippie beard, is 6ft 5in and not so much deadpan as dry as a cactus on
the sun. “Jesus, does he have to drive so crazy?” balks Stoermer as we’re
bounced around in a people carrier across infinite dusty, bumpy terrain.
“We’re going so far out to go to the desert and there’s desert everywhere.
You know what? We’re always in the desert. Photos, videos… We are The Desert
Band. I never come out here. There’s snakes out here.”
Dave Keuning, guitarist/songwriter, the one with the Marc Bolan hair, concurs.
“I don’t wanna get my boots dirty again,” he laments. “This is
almost like where we went for a music-magazine shoot a coupl’a years ago. That
one sucked — they didn’t even put us on the cover. They made a flap over
three of us!”
Ronnie Vannucci, drummer/songwriter, is always happy: “The desert makes you
feel like a cowboy!” And Brandon Flowers, singer/songwriter/keyboardist, the
one who looks like Matt Dillon in the 1980s and has never been flapped off a
magazine cover in his life (and is, as far as we know, the world’s only
Morrissey-fixated rock’n’roll Mormon in eyeliner), loves the desert so much
he’s just bought a piece.
“I bought some land,” he smiles, all enormous American nuclear-white teeth. “I
love the city too, but people don’t realise the beauty in the ancient dirt.
I try to capture that in our songs, how I feel when I’m looking at the
sunsets in the mountains. Have you been to Los Angeles? Well, our sunsets
are better!” They say Flowers is a competitive man. So much so, indeed, he’s
even competitive about sunsets...
Six years into their fashionably indie-cool career, and the Killers are about
to take the kind of gamble even a margarita-drenched Parrothead at a Vegas
roulette table would think twice about: a glittering 1980s synth-pop album
called Day & Age, featuring cabaret trumpets, comedy saxophones and calypso
steel drums. They’ve taken gambles before (and won). In 2004 their debut
album, Hot Fuss, was an overnight classic.
A band besotted by late 1970s/early 1980s British bands — from Joy
Division/New Order to the Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys, they were widely
acknowledged as America’s “best British band”. Even better, unlike their New
York forebears the Strokes, art-fop rich kids dressing like threadbare
students, they were working-class innocents dressing like a glitz-pop show
band, celebrating flamboyance via shimmering golden suits.
Then, in 2006, they turned “American”. Their critic-confounding follow-up
album, Sam’s Town, was infused with Tom Petty/Bruce Springsteen cinematic
ambition — while they dressed, astonishingly, like 19th-century
frontiersmen, with enormous self-grown moustaches, establishing themselves
as America’s Weirdest Band. The moustaches, certainly, were less pioneering
dirt cowboy, more Mexican gay porn. “Mexican gay porn!” hoots Vannucci. “I
wanna grow mine back now.”
e’re in a downtown retro-chic club called Celebrity (crimson walls,
black-leather sofas, curtains made of silver ball bearings), where the
Killers are rehearsing for their forthcoming global tour, instruments
twinkling on the dance floor: a golden drum kit, a keyboard festooned with
scarlet rhinestones, a huge golden-lacquered saxophone. Perched on a stool
in the empty dressing room, Flowers is proving himself a gentle, romantic
and nervy character, knee constantly drumming a beat, wearing a crisp, red
checked shirt, skinny black jeans and shiny black shoes.
My, he’s handsome (no eyeliner today), all intense dark brown eyes, flawless
skin, black hair sculpting upwards with the hint of a 1950s quiff. Day & Age
was produced by the British producer Stuart Price (famed for Madonna’s
Confessions on a Dancefloor), Flowers seeing this latest sonic adventure as
“brave, fun, a celebration”. It’s his way, perhaps, of trying to cheer the
world up, maybe even see us through the recession.
He has a surprisingly boyish voice, with a comical, girlish giggle. “All I
know is there’s too much negativity and seriousness out there — there’s
cynicism everywhere you go. I think there’s been moments when we’ve overdone
trying to be serious; we were too young. There should be more moments of
being carefree, at least when you come to see your favourite band. Hopefully
your favourite band!”
Flowers, at 27, is even younger than his young years, still young enough to
believe in the importance of a “favourite band”. The lyrics of the first
single from Day & Age, Human, are a poetic delight. “Are we human, or
are we dancer?” he lilts, inspired by the late gonzo-prose pioneer Hunter S
Thompson, who surmised of America: “we’re raising a generation of dancers”.
(Lyrics also include a farewell roll-call to the human qualities of virtue,
soul, romance, good and devotion.)
It’s a critique, you’d imagine, of our Entertainment Era, our young
generation’s dreams forever entwined in ephemeral showbiz trifle. “It’s part
of that,” he nods. “I’ll say it’s a mild social statement and I’m leaving it
at that. I don’t wanna be a preacher. The devotion part, I think of my
parents being married for 45 years and how that’s a dying thing and I’m
trying to hold onto some of those things. I am very old-fashioned, I guess.
And the older I get, the worse it is. But I dunno if that’s what people want
to hear!”
Flowers, like the rest of the Killers, is a curiously insecure character, on
permanent alert for the foolish, controversial or somehow wrong statement.
It is, surely, a media-generation twitchiness, a tragic consequence of our
brutally cynical tabloid celebrity world. He’s been burnt in the past, seen
statements he’s made “put a target on us”, like the kids’-stuff spats
between himself and rival bands.
They should, really, be crackling with who-cares confidence: they’re adored by
their chum Bono (the Killers have supported U2), are loved by Elton John,
this December releasing a collaboration with Elton, the Christmas song
Joseph, Better You than Me — “My idea,” confirms Flowers, “because Joseph is
the most overlooked person in the whole Christmas-story equation.” Six
months ago, Flowers and Keuning were invited by Duran Duran to play Planet
Earth with them here in Vegas. Flowers has long been convinced that the
Killers could become both “the next U2” and “the next Duran Duran”, perhaps
believing a hybrid could one day make sense.
Their famous pals, certainly, would approve of Flowers’s latest stage wear, a
black tuxedo festooned with feathery epaulettes, specially made for him by
Fee Doran, the designer behind Kylie’s mythological hooded white jump suit
in the Can’t Get You Out of My Head video. Taking centre stage in the Human
video (shot in the desert) Flowers’s epaulettes adorn pop’s greatest
minimalist shoulder wiggle since Cher in the Believe video and establishes
him, once again, as the best-dressed dandy in rock’n’roll today.
“What we wear is definitely rooted in where we’re from,” he nods. “Elvis,
Sinatra, showgirls. I don’t understand why more people don’t wear sequins —
they’re wonderful under a spotlight. And I also sometimes wonder if
it’s my mask. I know I would feel petrified if I wore a T-shirt on stage. I
would! I couldn’t even get through a song.”
Back in the desert, meanwhile, on approaching Flowers during our photoshoot
for “a feel” of those feathery epaulettes, he tells me he has no idea what
kind of feathers they are but they’re stripy, which matches “the tiger
idea”, a recurring theme on the album. Why a tiger theme? “Ur, you have that
thing on!” he yelps, staring at the voice recorder before actually running
away into the desert until you can’t see him, literally, for dust.
Dave Keuning, 32, and Mark Stoermer, 31, are so media-suspicious that even the
breeziest of inquiries makes Brandon Flowers seem like an audacious stand-up
comedian. Ask Stoermer (a dropped-out philosophy student and sometime
medical-supplies courier) why the bow tie appears to be his sartorial thing
and he is aghast. “It’s not my thing,” he protests. “It’s an article of
clothing that men wear, occasionally.”
Keuning, meanwhile, is another college dropout. The lifelong aspiring
musician, who placed a newspaper advert looking for musicians back in 2002
which Flowers responded to (he mentioned Oasis), is also a space-tourism
enthusiast. He has made inquires with Virgin Galactic but holds back from
fulsome discussion. “I just like to travel,” he explains. “It’s an adventure
thing. Before I die I’d like to see the Earth from space, and I’d like to go
to the moon… but I don’t know why we’re going on about it so much…” Inquire
about Keuning’s reputation as the Killers’ “party guy” and a wry cackle
ensues. “It depends on the night!”
Ronnie Vannucci, 32, is by several dimensions the most gregarious member of
the Killers — a drummer who wears an Animal (from the Muppets) T-shirt, a
married man and a music-college-trained multi-percussionist. The Killers, he
says, are ambivalent about the recognition they’ve always craved. “Y’know,
we all don’t come from much.
We don’t come from a lotta money, we come from everyday families, and so all
of a sudden to be on the map as far as rock’n’roll goes, and how people
treat you, it’s an adjustment. Brandon wants the spotlight but he also
doesn’t want it. It’s hard to navigate. I think he’s doing well. But for the
most part it’s been all good experiences. We don’t get a lot of heavy
breathers.”
It’s hard to be a Mormon, of course, in rock’n’roll. Flowers “does my best” to
follow the virtuous code but sometimes drinks vodka Red Bull, and champagne
on special occasions, and regularly smokes cigarettes. As a teenager he
tried weed but it gave him The Fear. His parents grew up on the same Las
Vegas trailer park, started dating when they were around 15 and have stayed
married for 45 years, with six children (Brandon is the youngest by several
years), as documented on the new album in A Dustland Fairytale: “A dustland
fairytale begins, just another white-trash-county kiss.”
Flowers, before the Killers’ success, didn’t own a passport. His dad was an
alcoholic until Flowers was five. “My five siblings had a different dad from
me,” he nods, “but he was a good man, he was never abusive to my
mom, he wasn’t as bad as his dad.” In the 1980s, Dad Flowers converted to
Mormonism overnight after a dramatic religious epiphany. Did he turn to
faith, you wonder, as a map for a less destructive life?
“No, it’s just something happened to him he couldn’t deny,” he says of the
epiphany. “Usually you get baptised in churches with a font, but it was so
overwhelming for him he had to do it that night, and they couldn’t get in a
church — so they did it in a swimming pool. I was there. It was great! I
saw him get baptised. They were in the shallow end.”
He adored his brother, Shane, 13 years his senior, the one who introduced him
to the Smiths and the Cure and changed his life for ever, taking him to a
Cure concert aged 15 where “I was manhandled by this girl, she threw me in
the bathroom and put eyeliner on me and I liked it, I liked the belonging.”
Here in 2008, perhaps Flowers would like to take responsibility for make-up
now being designed specifically for men, from an Yves Saint Laurent
collection to Superdrug’s own brand, Taxi Man, which this summer introduced
the concepts of “Guyliner” and “Manscara”.
“Manscara!” he giggles. “I’ll have my lawyer look into it — we should be
seeing a little of this profit.” He was, astonishingly, an overweight kid
until the age of 15 — “I was… husky” is how he describes it — now
sporting the skinny indie-kid’s dream physique and matching psychological
burden. “I just loved food,” he notes. “I still love food. I have an
addictive personality. I don’t shoot up, so I have to watch it if I’m gonna
be up on stage and feel worthy. You grow up looking at Iggy Pop and
Morrissey, so I guess it gives me a complex. It’s just hard for me — I have
to stop myself. But you could have worse problems.”
Cruelly, for a weight-conscious teenager, on dropping out of college and after
a spell as a hotel bellhop, Flowers worked in a restaurant, once serving
pizza to his all-time hero, Morrissey — “It was mushroom”. He told Morrissey
how much he loved him and Morrissey wilfully ignored him. By 2004, Morrissey
had asked the Killers to support him on tour in LA; they’re surely
acquaintances at last?
“No,” he laments, “we opened for him but I haven’t touched him. I would like
to. When I was 15 I saw him play and my friend got his hand at the gig, so
I’m still searching. For a handshake. He watched us sound-check and I was
just petrified. If only I’d said ‘Hello,’ maybe we’d be pen pals now. Fax
pals. [Sighs.] Too late.”
In 2002, two years before the Killers turned Brandon Flowers into the most
desirable 23-year-old spectre in glamorous indie rock’n’roll, he met the
woman who would become his wife, the tantalisingly named Tana Munblowsky,
while shopping in a vintage-clothes store. Today they have a 16-month-old
son, Ammon.
“She was wearing a pink trench coat,” smiles Flowers. “She worked at Betsey
Johnson; she was cooler than me. I believe in fate. She’s perfect for me. I
knew early on. She’s just different, creative, full of life. We’re lucky
enough that she gets to stay home and do fun things with the baby. Our kids
are gonna be lucky. Y’know, I still don’t feel like a man but having a son
has taken me a giant step closer. I’m trying my best to become one. And a
good one. It puts it all into context. I’d always think of how much I wanna
devote my life to what I do and that just hit a brick wall. ‘Uh, I really
gotta rethink things.’ He cries when I go to the store. And then if I’m
gonna go for a month I think, ‘Is he gonna remember me?’ It’s hard. It’s
scary. But we’ll figure it out. People have been doing it for a while.”
Flowers is a hugely sentimental person in the process, it seems, of
re-enacting the lives of the parents he clearly adores. In the last year,
his mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and the closing song on the
album, the atmospherically epic Goodnight, Travel Well, has now taken on a
new import, originally written in tribute to Keuning’s mother, who recently
died.
“My mom is doing chemotherapy and radiation, but she’s holding on, she’s
good,” nods Flowers quietly.
“It all happened really quickly. It’s scary. You just never know. I always
heard their stories: about my dad’s dad, who got gangrene and it was
awful; my dad’s mom died in a car-and-a-train accident. They talk
about it like it’s no big deal now. Y’know. Scary.” What do you think the
“afterlife” you believe in will look and feel like?
He giggles nervously in reply. “Well, I’m not an ambassador — I don’t know if
it needs to be coming out of my mouth. We think we still have bodies. Flesh
and bone. But I don’t get this body, no. It’s a different body. Same soul. I
get a more perfected version. Uh, not like Fabio [the legendary Italian male
model]. Everybody’s not gonna be sexy all of a sudden! But it’s perfect in
the sense that you’re not gonna die. Um. I try and stay away from this!
Because people say I’m deluded all the time. And stupid for believing. I’m
just trying not to let anybody down.”
Politically, as a band, the Killers are also enigmatic. Today in Las Vegas
we’re just two weeks away from the presidential election but they’re coy in
discussing their vote. A patriotic band, ever since Flowers once said “I
refuse to say ‘F*** Bush’ ” (feeling it was a cheap publicity shot), there
have been assumptions they must be Republicans, as bad for rock’n’roll
credentials as Mormonism. Ronnie admits he’s undecided. “I just don’t have
that much faith in our system to believe there is gonna be change,” he
muses. “But the band haven’t gone on record as being Republicans or
Democrats. Or libertarians. Or anarchists. All hail rock’n’roll! We’d rather
take people’s mind off their goddamn problems. But that may change as we
become more aware and educated.”
“America is not the best it’s ever been but I’m optimistic,” decides Flowers.
“I think we’re resilient and our ideals are still there as a
foundation, and I think we’re gonna bounce back. There is hope. What are you
gonna put, that I want Obama? I’m staying out of it!”
House of Blues, Mandalay Bay hotel, October 20.
Las Vegas knows every word to the Killers’ songs, and is roaring along to
those indie-pop catchphrases with chandelier-rattling gusto. Flowers’s
tuxedo is magnificent, the feathers seemingly elevating him upwards, as if
lifted into the air by two elegantly fluttering falcons, arms fully
outstretched to the sides, the coolest man-boy in the world.
Tonight their families are here (Flowers’s mum, dad and brother Shane
included) and they play four new songs for the very first time. Las Vegas is
astonished, suddenly silent, though each new song ends with an extended
whoop of encouragement. It’s a tremendous show, an electrifying prism of
disco-glam euphoria. Backstage, Vannucci is celebrating by throwing his
newly removed socks onto crew members’ heads and searching for specially
requested whisky (a connoisseur, his all-time favourite is Aberlour A’Bunadh
Speyside single malt). It’s a sober night for Flowers, though, already
changed back into his red checked shirt and bustling round the dressing room
folding his skinny black trousers neatly onto a hanger. “The show was
all right, 50-50,” he frets. “They don’t know the new songs. But I know how
good they are and they’re gonna love ’em! But I wasn’t in key for [new song]
Joyride once…”
This is the moment where, being a preposterous perfectionist, Flowers now
decides his robustly beautiful voice is “no good”, is convinced tonsilitis
is imminent and cancels tomorrow night’s show in San Francisco, causing
considerable logistical drama. Keuning and Stoermer, sipping bottles of
Hoegaarden, have something to show us. “We met Clinton yesterday,” enthuses Keuning
as Stoermer produces a photograph of the pair beside a beaming Bill Clinton.
They had visited their old Vegas school, where Clinton was appearing at a rally
for Barack Obama.
“Clinton is one of the men I always wanted to meet,” smiles Keuning, “a great
man and a nice fellow. I was gonna see if he could play saxophone for us
tonight…” Here, Flowers finally casts his elusive vote, a few words cracking
forth like some sacred tableau broken off the side of a mountain. “Obama is
my man,” he announces. “I have my own personal reasons why. I just don’t
want to seem like I’m jumping on a rock’n’roll bandwagon. That’s all you’re
getting out of me!”
“Y’know, we’re all a lot more self-conscious than we were
before all this,” states Keuning, staring at the voice recorder. “We’re all
kind of shy. A little afraid. That what’s in print will be taken the
wrong way.” That’s such an exhausting way to live, I say. One day, you won’t
care what anyone thinks any more. You’ll live in the realm of…
post-embarrassment! “Well,” he snorts, “I’m sure somebody
will think of some way to embarrass us!”
Flowers, meanwhile, is far happier looking back, now leafing through a book of
black-and-white photographs documenting Vegas through the years. “Look,” he
smiles, pointing to a large, twinkling casino hotel, the Frontier, the
1942-built, western-themed legend that hosted Elvis’s first-ever Las Vegas
show in 1956, the final-ever performance by Diana Ross and the Supremes in
1970 and was demolished in July 2007.
Only one artefact remains: its outdoor, freestanding, tourist-attracting sign,
last updated in the 1960s, a colossal vertical column with the word
“Frontier” horizontally bolted through the middle. This
iron-and-neon icon is 190ft tall, as tall as a high-rise tower — and Brandon
Flowers is about to own it.
“The people who owned it said they’ll give me the sign for free,” he blinks.
“So I’m going to put it on my land I was telling you about. I only have to
pay them to load it onto my land. So I’ll light it up at night and it’ll say
“Frontier” in the desert. But it might be too big. Look how big it is! It’s
ridiculous! But it’s so cool.”
Right now, the 27-year-old Brandon Flowers is as glitter-eye-thrilled as a
schoolboy, carefree at last, chosen caretaker to genuine rock’n’roll
history. Big, ridiculous and cool: just like the Killers themselves.
