The time is 1am in Verona, and deep in the bowels of the Italian city’s
2,000-year-old amphitheatre the Killers are hard at work, rest and play.
Eight months into the 20-month world tour in support of their third album Day
& Age, it’s the last night before an eight-day break for the band.
Thereafter, a summer headlining European festivals beckons.
Dave Keuning, the guitarist, and the bass player Mark Stoermer are slumped in
the dressing room, chatting with a squiffy-sounding Juliette Lewis — the
Oscar-nominated actress-turned-rocker was tonight’s support act. Drummer
Ronnie Vannucci, lubricated by the pink champagne presented by the grateful
local promoter — the show was a 10,600-capacity sell-out — is exploring the
ancient venue’s murkiest corners. “Hey, is this where the Christians came
out?” he shouts as we peer into a barred tunnel, “followed by the lions?”
And Brandon Flowers, the singer? He’s working. The 27-year-old is sitting at a
laptop scrutinising pictures of the Killers. They have been taken by their
on-tour photographer, Torey Mundkowsky, Flowers’s brother-in-law. Tana, his
sister, whom Flowers married in Hawaii four years ago, is about to give
birth to the couple’s second child (their son Ammon is now 2).
Flowers, who is five years younger than his bandmates, is a rock star who
likes to be in control. So he’s deciding which of the images taken during
this sweltering June day in glorious Verona can go out to the world’s media.
There are 1,200 to pick from. Despite the prospect of a 6am pick-up for the
flight home to Las Vegas, he studies each shot and finally approves a couple
of dozen. It is, he insists, more about caution than vanity. As he told me
last year: “It’s our destiny that we’re playing with here.” To the same end,
he watches past performances on YouTube, alert to deficiencies in the band’s
stagecraft. He loves it, he says, when the force of the Killers’ music
“takes me away. Sometimes you do become a robot. But the best nights are
when you just forget and really become a part of the music and the crowds.”
The Killers are a people’s band with a common touch, an appeal propelled by
their huge, singalong choruses and the singer’s matinee idol looks. I’ve
seen 100,000 bedraggled kids going bananas for them at Glastonbury; I’ve had
Pet Shop Boy and pop sage Neil Tennant rave about Flowers’ talents; and I’ve
seen mums in the school playground go weak-kneed at mention of his name.
Still, he clearly thinks he could do better. “Oh, I think I look
stiff!” he says, laughing the warbly, yuk-yuk laugh that sounds like Jimmy
Stewart. By way of illustration, he mentions one of his idols, Bruce
Springsteen. “We played right before them the other night in the
Netherlands. They played a lot of their new album. The way that they got the
crowd to respond to new songs — they’re such pros! I was in shock.”
Such mastery of the big stage “has made me rethink things. I’ve taken notes.”
He laughs — not that he’s joking — in conversation he just laughs a lot,
often through nerves. For all his onstage braggadoccio, he’s a friendly but
jittery conversationalist. His legs do the St Vitus’ dance, he cracks his
knuckles and he sits bolt upright, as if poised to flee.
At the Dutch show, the Pink Pop festival, Flowers joined Springsteen onstage
for a duet on Thunder Road. “He watched us play, watched the whole
set. And on our way back to our dressing room he asked if I wanted to [sing
with him], right after we played. It was great. I was dying! I had a
perma-grin.” He says he had imagined sharing a stage with The Boss “easily
150 times”. It was “a dream come true”.
Destiny. Becoming one with the music and the crowd. A dream come true. These
are the kind of things Flowers says. In cold print they make him sound too
good to be true, a showbiz huckster hailing from Vegas; an entertainer who
aspires to the blood and guts of Springsteen but actually couldn’t be more
vanilla. He is indeed a practising Mormon who largely refuses alcohol but
does allow himself the odd cigarette. It’s his ambition that drives the band
towards the multimillion album sales, awards and festival-headlining slots.
On the road the group now has the trappings that go with them: two tour
buses, one for Stoermer and Keuning (both single), one for Flowers and
Vannucci (both married). They are known as the Welcome to the Jungle bus and
the James Taylor bus respectively.
“We’ve always talked about our career and how we want the steps; there seems
to be a pedestal that’s waiting for us ,” Flowers says. U2 and Radiohead are
already on that pedestal. “This is the time [for us] to step up.”
This means big choruses, loud anthems, total vision and a lot of eyeliner. The
Killers, particularly Flowers, dress how their music makes them feel. On
their debut album, the New Romantic-goe — indie Hot Fuss
(2004), they wore make-up and pastel jackets, proof of the young Flowers’
anglophile enthusiasm for New Order and the Smiths. For the Americana of its
follow-up, Sam’s Town (2006), they wore bootlace ties and
waistcoats.
On that second album — named after an old blue-collar Las Vegas casino —
Flowers was, in part, acknowledging his working-class roots. He grew up in a
close-knit family in smalltown Utah, the youngest (by 12 years) of six; his
father worked in grocery stores for 30 years. But American audiences were
confused by the volte-face. A damning review in Rolling Stone was a
sore point. Did Americans think that the Killers were trying too hard to be
American?
“Maybe,” Flowers nods. “We came out and we’re wearing suits and there’s glitz.
Definitely they saw [the Sam’s Town vibe] as being contrived. I
understand that.”
The band, though, believes in change, in moving on. “There’s a lot of that
with all of us,” notes Vannucci of a band that came together in 2001 after
Keuning advertised for like-minded musicians (he mentioned the Cure and
Oasis). Thus, in their latest move, it’s out with widescreen rock, in with
the synth-pop of Day & Age. And in with the Dolce & Gabbana
jacket with pheasant feather shoulders that Flowers has been wearing for the
past few months.
Flowers is an intriguingly conflicted rock star. He claims that he has some
form of telepathy (“persuasions” he calls them) about bad things. He used to
fear the number 621 (he was born on June 21) — and hated driving at 6.21pm,
for example. He claims he’s come to terms with that now, although he’s still
worried about flying.
“One time we happened to be on the same flight as Brian Wilson. And just
before we take off he says, ‘If this thing goes down over the Atlantic it’ll
be the end of all of our lives!’ He just shouted it out! I was like, ‘Oh
s***! Thank you!’ He’s crazy.” The Air France disaster has preoccupied him
of late. “It’s kept me up a lot,” he admits. “I got a cold sore from
worrying so much!” he says, fingering his troubled top lip.
The man who hymns the strength of his parents’ five decades of marriage in the
new single A Dustland Fairytale is about to become a father again.
The baby is expected in one of the small gaps in their touring schedule. He
has some decisions to make. “I have seen interviews with kids whose dads did
what I did, and they all seem to be resentful. I don’t want that. But I also
feel like I’ve been given this opportunity . . . ”
His Mormon faith puts a high premium on the closeness of family. His dad,
formerly Roman Catholic and something of a drinker, converted to his
mother’s Mormon faith overnight when Flowers was 5. His elder brother Shane,
a golfer, could have had a place on the PGA tour (like their cousin, the pro
golfer Craig Barlow) but chose not to because it would have meant too long
away from home. All religions value family, I point out. “Yes, but ours is
slightly different — we believe in being together . . . um,” he hesitates
warily, “for ever. Eternity.”
A few short hours later, the Killers scatter for their holiday. Stoermer, who
struggles badly with jet lag, is staying near by: he’s taking copies
of Dante’s Inferno and some T. S. Eliot to Florence. Keuning is
bound for San Diego to see Kylar, his three-year-old son; Vannucci is
escaping to his place in the Utah mountains with his wife; and Flowers is
going home to Vegas. He’s taking his driving test, and he and his wife are
going on a date. His local cinema is showing the 1986 movie Pretty in
Pink.
“I’ve already got the tickets, we’ve got the babysitter. I would not be in
this band if Pretty in Pink didn’t exist. Echo & the
Bunnymen, New Order, the Smiths and Psychedelic Furs — the music on that
soundtrack is the stuff that shaped me.”
And what about the film’s underdog hero Duckie, the geeky kid with the secret
crush on his best friend? “Well,” Flowers smiles, “we all have a little
Duckie inside us.”
The Killers play Hyde Park, London W1, on Friday; www.thekillersmusic.com
