In the beginning, The Killers were renowned as the best British band ever to come out of Las Vegas, but since then, their music has come to reflect a dusty, nostalgic sort of Americana. I ask Flowers how he accounts for this shift in the music, and he tells me that it came with a shift in his own perspective. “I was still very young when we started out, and I think I was still searching for a lot of things, and my own identity being one of those,” he says. “I was obsessed with British culture and music, and then somebody put me on a plane …” he pauses to laugh, “… and stuck me there, and I realised that you can fantasise about something as much as you want, but the reality is never going to be what you expect. You are who you are, and I was who I was.” This is the first of many times he’ll use this phrase or something similar, ‘I am what I am’ being a phrase method of explaining away awkward or uncomfortable topics.
The Killers’ most recent album, Battle Born, taps this vein of Americana pretty deeply. From its cover art, which features a stallion and a sports car charging at each other on a dusty desert highway, to songs like Miss Atomic Bomb, whose lyrics draw on the classic American themes of hot nights and heavy petting, it’s all there. It seems that, in the early days, The Killers’ music was about trying to be as far away from home as possible, whereas now, they’re feeling pretty comfortable on their home turf. Flowers more-or-less agrees with this assessment. “Since Hot Fuss, the music I’ve made has been a conscious effort to find out what exactly I am, and it draws closer to America, because that’s what I’m familiar with,” he says. ”I feel like I have more of a duty, and more of a … what’s the word? I guess I have more insight into America. I guess it makes more sense to me, because it’s where I’m from.”
There’s a certain streak of sentimentality that runs through the music of The Killers – from their early smash When You Were Young through to a song like The Way It Was, they seem to constantly be reflecting on the past. There’s a dash of sadness behind the storming hooks, an urge to reflect on glory days and better times, and Flowers admits that, from an early age, he has always been the sentimental type. “Even when I was very young, I was like that,” he says. “I don’t know who I inherited that from…but I love to tell stories, and it’s inevitable that the stories end up having those sentiments. People appreciate that kind of honesty. What’s great about that is that as I grow and have new experiences, the meaning in songs starts to change – that’s true of the songs that I love, as well as the ones that I’ve written myself. I can start to appreciate them in a whole new way. I’m happy to be part of it all.” He pauses again, and then laughs. “It’s not always cool to be so sentimental, but I am what I am!”
Brandon Flowers himself is quite a prolific songwriter – every two years since The Killers’ debut, he’s come up with another batch of songs. His debut solo record, Flamingo, arrived three years ago, and the songs were actually meant to be for the band, but when they decided they wanted to take some time off, he went again and recorded them anyway, with frequent collaborators like Stuart Price and Daniel Lanois in the studio. Songwriting, it seems, is in his blood, and I ask him if he is constantly working on new material. “I’m thinking about it all the time,” he says. “It’s humbling when you learn about people that have…I got nothing on Bob Marley or Bob Dylan, these people that were extremely prolific. I think those are the kinds of people that keep me going, the kinds of people that I admire. Guys like that are always trying. They say that if you stop practising, you kind of lose it. I guess I worry about that.”
If The Killers have embraced their American roots more fully since the early days, they’ve also embraced their changing audience. These days, the band play to sold-out arena and festival crowds, and the songs on Battle Born have a grand, anthemic quality, as if Flowers and company knew, on writing the songs, that they’d be playing to packed houses. When I ask the extent to which the size of the crowd affects the songwriting, Flowers is a little coy. “We’re pretty …” he pauses, “we’re accustomed to playing big show, put it that way. We’re a very lucky band; I can definitely say that. We feel very honoured to get to play the shows we do.” After a hiatus of several years, the band are certainly thrilled to be out on the road playing to these crowds again. “The first shows back on this tour were a lot of festivals,” he says, “and the atmosphere was really celebratory. It’s been really great.”
The Killers are especially excited to be heading to Australia again, where they will headline the Big Day Out tour over the summer. “Every time we’ve played in Australia, it’s been the summertime, so we’re very happy to be coming back,” he says. “You’re going to have four happy Killers!” During the Day And Age era, the band’s live show was all about Vegas flash and sparkle, but Flowers tells me they’ve toned it down a little since then. “We wanted something that was more crisp and simple this time,” he says. “There’s always so much made about the jacket that I’m wearing on stage and other things like that – the live show right now is more about us just being ourselves, I guess, and hopefully letting the music and the show do the talking.”
As for his prowess as a front man – on the band’s last tour, he was as much an old-school Vegas showman as he was a singer, working the crowd like an old pro – Flowers is philosophical. “I feel really powerful right now,” he says. “Not to boast, but I feel really comfortable in my own skin. I’ve come to grips with what it means to be on stage, and embraced it.” The band’s bombastic sound, and their lyrics, packed with sinners, desperados, gamblers and other shady characters, definitely help him get into character. “There are a lot of elements of glam rock and pop in The Killers’ sound, and those things both lend themselves to showmanship – it’s not something we’ve ever shied away from, let me put it that way.”
Before letting Flowers go, I have to get just one fan question in. Since the Hot Fuss era, my favourite Killers song has always been Andy, You’re A Star, a high school-set tale of sexual confusion and secret crushes. I’ve always been curious as to what inspired it, and now I finally have the chance to ask. “I think it came from …” he pauses once again, “I wouldn’t say that I was an outcast at school, but when you’re at school, it’s always the case that the more athletically-gifted kids, the popular kids, are somewhat glorified, and that frustrated me a bit. I guess I was trying to be ironic with that song, and that’s where it stemmed from.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
