Portrait of a Serial Killer

By: David Jenison | Photos by Musikexpress/Erik Weiss, Getty Images | April 01, 2009 | Music

Brandon Flowers thinks California is its own country. No, he’s not related to Miss Teen South Carolina; he was just making a joke on The Killers’ Web site after some distinctly Golden State experiences.

“I was walking down Hollywood Blvd., and a bunch of stuff happened to me in a span of three minutes,” Flowers recounts. “First, this large man gets in my face and starts barking, and less than a minute later someone shoots me in the leg with a pellet gun. It stung like hell. A minute after that, Dave Navarro walks by with a hood on, trying not to be noticed and jets into this leather shop. And 20 feet behind him, there’s this 6’ 5” tranny. People think Las Vegas is crazy, but I’ve never had anything like this happen to me back home.”

For Angelenos, seeing Navarro near a tranny is about as shocking as hearing a would-be starlet blab about her auditions, but maybe the Mormon-raised Flowers has been moving too fast for his eyes to soak in the full rock-star experience. To think, it’s only been four years since Eric Roberts did them a favor by appearing in the Mr. Brightside music video and just six years since Flowers, Dave Keuning (guitar), Mark Stoermer (bass) and Ronnie Vannucci (drums) became a band. In the short time since Somebody Told Me became the song of summer ’04, the Las Vegas dance-rockers circled the globe repeatedly, topped the modern-rock charts and released three albums and a rarities disc.

“It’s exciting to capture where we are at this moment,” says Flowers, explaining the band’s ambitious output. “It would be a real shame not to put it on record. If you go a few years without recording, it’s scary to think of what we might miss.”

Another career highlight came in 2005 when the band performed on the London stage of Live 8, an experience Flowers said would be tough to beat. Fittingly, The Killers might finally top it on this side of the pond when they headline Coachella on April 18. This puts the band in rare company, especially considering the other nights’ headliners are Paul McCartney and The Cure.

Interestingly, The Killers are the only American act among Coachella’s top six headliners. The event’s hipster crowd tends to have an affinity for British acts — hence such past headliners as Oasis, Coldplay, Radiohead, Roger Waters, Depeche Mode and Daft Punk — yet The Killers fit because the band’s music straddles both sides of the Atlantic. Despite their Euro-dance touches, The Killers remain steeped in the imagery of their Southwestern roots. The band’s music videos, from All These Things I’ve Done to last fall’s Human, capture a Silver State cowboy aesthetic that recalls Depeche Mode’s classic Personal Jesus video, but with more authenticity.

“I love being from the Southwest,” explains Flowers. “It’s something that is very uniquely ours. When you go to England and mention Las Vegas, it’s becoming hand-in-hand with The Killers and the desert. I’m proud of that, and it’s nice to have that continuing theme.”

For all their Euro flourishes, the band’s music also pays homage to classic rock artists like Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie. Flowers admits that 2006’s Sam’s Town was largely inspired by the Boss’ Born to Run, while the band’s new album Day & Age works in jazzy horns, a little Graceland and even some funky Motown beats.

Still, the band wanted Day & Age to recapture the dance energy of its debut, so they recorded the new album with Stuart Price, aka Jacques Lu Cont, the Grammy-winning electro wiz behind Les Rythmes Digitales, and artists like Madonna and Gwen Stefani. If the band was chasing a big resume having Flood and Alan Moulder produce Sam’s Town, The Killers caught the big sound by enlisting Price. The result is an album that’s much more playful than Sam’s Town and more expansive than Hot Fuss.

“This record is a real combination of the first two albums,” Flowers believes. “It’s got the audacity of Sam’s Town and the shimmer of Hot Fuss, but it’s not in any way going back. I feel like we took our strengths and tried something new. Price has had a fair amount of success, but he’s still got that hunger. He reminded us that we can write a pop song, and that we shouldn’t shy away from it.”

Music and visuals aside, there is also a noticeable change in Flowers himself. While his love affair with the media recalls John McCain in the early aughts, the singer’s loose tongue seems more like Joe Biden. At the height of The Killers craze, Flowers lashed out at Arcade Fire and Fall Out Boy for “riding their coattails,” and he prefaced the release of Sam’s Town by calling it “one of the best albums in the last 20 years.”

These days, Flowers comes across more humble. In large part, he says, it comes from being in a young band that’s still searching out its identity on a world stage.

“Sometimes we have no idea what we are doing,” he says with a nervous laugh. “I struggle with the identity of what we are. You want to have your place; you want to find your place. We are still a baby band, and it’s strange that we are so big and that it happened so quickly. Twenty years ago, people were allowed to have five albums to get there. People like Depeche Mode and U2 grew into what they are. People don’t realize that we are still trying to grow and get to that place. It’s just more complicated because we exploded early on.”

Day & Age singles Human and Spaceman fared well in the states, and the Brits recently loaded up the album with several NME and Brit Awards nominations. The Killers might be forging their identity in the spotlight, but so far no one seems to mind.

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