The Killers: ‘People doing gigs without knowing what the hell this virus is yet? It’s crazy’

Brandon Flowers’s Las Vegas superstars may just have made their best album since 2006, but they won’t be touring it anytime soon. He and drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr talk to Mark Beaumont about Trump, Kanye, working with Lindsey Buckingham, and why lockdown is great for songwriting

The Killers (from left, Mark Stoermer, Brandon Flowers and Ronnie Vannucci) embrace contemporary alt-pop influences on their new album ‘Imploding the Mirage’ (Robert Ashcroft)

Brandon Flowers settles back into an imaginary Chesterfield, pictures himself at the desk of an Oval Office decorated with neon lightning bolts and considers what would enter the statute books in the reign of his presidency.

“I don’t have the most romantic vision of what leaders do,” The Killers’ podium-perfect frontman says, not a little statesmanlike. “I don’t know how much power they really have but I do believe that they can inspire people and bring people together as the face of the country or their state, and we’re seeing the precise opposite of that with what’s going on right now. One thing that would be on my agenda would be to stop dividing and remind people of where we’re similar. I think that’s better than finding our differences and exploiting them, like Trump’s doing at the moment.”

Two years ago, Las Vegas’s breakout glamour rockers shattered their firmly apolitical stance to release the stand-alone single “Land of the Free”, an attack, six years in the writing, on the rot setting into America’s values. “Everything from school shootings to talk about building the border wall, or someone would capture their boyfriend getting killed by a police officer on their phone, it was just relentless,” Flowers says of the surprise protest song from a band more associated with emotional synthrock like “Mr Brightside” and “Human”. “Finally, enough was enough and I just had to finish the song and put it out. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Today, Trump’s disastrous handling of the pandemic has tipped Flowers clean over the edge and onto the barricade. “You’re sitting there watching what was happening in Italy and Spain a few months ago and your heart went out to them,” he says down the phone from his new home in the wholesome mountain town of Park City, Utah, “and before you knew it we were the ones that people’s hearts were going out to. You can’t even turn to your leaders. It’s a pretty gloomy time for America and we’re hoping that we can at least get a new face and a change of pace come November.”

He could have President Kanye... “I’m just frustrated with him, y’know?” Flowers laughs. “I think he means it. I don’t rule out him trying again in 2024. It scares me a little bit that we’re letting a lot of celebrities get that gross, but I hope that somebody more qualified is elected. We’re pulling for Biden I guess. I don’t want the same old business as usual, I think it’s good to stir things up and maybe Trump has done that somewhat, but we need real leadership and real experience and that’s who should be in that position.”

Drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr, whom I catch up with on a separate call, appears to have spent his pandemic downtime browsing the internet’s darker scientific corners. “This whole thing is very convenient, y’know? It feels oddly suspicious.” Does he think someone put Covid out there to sway the global order? “I don’t know. You think about the timing of the whole thing, it’s very weird. If it is a man-made, timing thing it’s very evil, which makes me want to just curl up under a rock somewhere.” Is Ronnie a closet conspiracy theorist? “I love it! I love a good conspiracy theory. This alien stuff, they released [UFO] footage that the US government is just putting out there, it’s very interesting what’s happening now.”

If Flowers were to launch his 2020 bid for the presidency, he’s got his stirring national address in the bag. The band’s fifth album Wonderful Wonderful, from 2017, gave the band their first US number one thanks to its rich, enveloping updates of the Eighties art rock of Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, The Cars and Fleetwood Mac, combined with Flowers’s most personal lyrics yet, dissecting his wife Tana’s PTSD from a variety of traumas in her upbringing. If that record was about reassurance, their new album Imploding the Mirage is all about defiance. As Flowers pictures his wife as a “featherweight queen” with “Hollywood eyes” escaping the town that triggers her on “Caution” (“it’s our Leaving Las Vegas song,” he confirms), or the steely heroine of “Blowback”, it’s clear this is Wonderful Wonderful’s sister record.

“Definitely,” Flowers declares. “You want a record to be cathartic, and making Wonderful Wonderful was going into new territories for me as a writer. For my wife to allow me to do that and for her to see the beauty in it and for people to feel like they weren’t alone, that was really important. So it was a release to make this record and to show the other side of it, to push on and persevere and what can happen. What I’m experiencing now with my family and the changes we’ve made, moving and not giving up, that’s an overarching message of this record.”

On “Running Towards a Place” and the bombastic “When the Dreams Run Dry”, Flowers even pictures his perfect family life extending into the hereafter, when “we’ll beat the birds down to Acapulco” on some kind of celestial jet stream. “I’m still a member of the LDS [Latter Day Saints, or Mormon] church and we’re brought up with something we refer to as an eternal perspective on life. The idea of our families being together in an afterlife as well.” As he approaches 40, is he thinking more about death? “Yeah, I’m halfway there! So you definitely start to think about how you spend your time and what you’re doing with it.”

The Killers have released their sixth studio album, ‘Imploding the Mirage’ (Olivia Bee)

Hence Flowers is entering his forties facing forward. From the outside, The Killers might seem in slo-mo collapse: both bassist Mark Stoermer and guitarist Dave Keuning retired from live duties with the band over recent years, Stoermer suffering from hearing issues caused by pyrotechnics at their Wembley Stadium show in 2013 and a creatively frustrated Keuning coming down with an all-consuming case of parenthood. While Stoermer attended sessions for Imploding the Mirage, it’s the first Killers album not to feature Keuning at all, leaving the band with a gaping hole to fill. An initial attempt at the album in Utah, with producer Jacknife Lee marshalling a “speed dating” parade of guests to fill Keuning’s shoes, felt “dishonest” and the sessions were scrapped.

It was hearing Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride album that reignited the old competitive fire Flowers once got from The Strokes’ Is This It. Envious and inspired, he realised he needed to raise his own bar again. So, rather than try to voodoo up the spirits of classic acts like The Cars, Springsteen or New Order as before, The Killers embraced contemporary alt-pop influences. Relocating sessions to LA with producers Shawn Everett and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, they welcomed suggestions to call in current indie heroes such as Weyes Blood, AKA Natalie Mering, and Adam Granduciel from The War on Drugs, for the stoner drivetime vibe.

The result is The Killers’ most relevant, enthused and plain best album since 2006’s Sam’s Town, a transitional modernist record that finds them spinning on a dime to face the future. “We made a record completely different than we would have with the full band,” says Vannucci, “and perhaps took more liberties, more chances with regards to sonics and even composition.”

Not that they could help hooking up with a hero or two. KD Lang plays the love interest on the Peter Gabriel-gone-gospel “Lightning Fields”, and when they were thinking of someone to come and burn guitar rubber over the final minutes of “Caution”, a call went out to none other than Lindsey Buckingham, formerly of Fleetwood Mac. “That was surreal,” Vannucci chuckles. “We’re talking about a guy who’s basically responsible for why I’m in music, who is probably largely responsible for my musical sensibilities. Here’s the guy, right here!”

“There are some of these iconic, almost mythical figures that are still walking amongst us,” Flowers adds, “Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Don Henley, Peter Gabriel, and he’s one of them for sure. He was really gracious and knew about The Killers and praised us for being able to be around for so long and stick together.”

‘Imploding the Mirage’ – a sister record for ‘Wonderful Wonderful’ (Island)

Like any candidate for society’s highest offices, Flowers has had to deal with dirt. Just weeks before the release of Imploding the Mirage, sound engineer Chez Cherrie re-shared a blog from 2018 concerning a tour she’d worked on in 2009. One night at the Eagles Ballroom in Milwaukee, she wrote, the front of house engineer told the audio crew members via radio that there was “a girl set up in Dressing Room A” and that they could put their names on a list to be called up “when it’s [their] turn”. The post claimed that a security guard reported the woman “passed out and naked” as the crew bus left, and this time named the crew concerned as that of The Killers.

The band themselves weren’t implicated, but their legal team conducted an internal investigation into the allegations, interviewing band, crew and venue staff. “We were able, thank heavens, to actually locate the woman that was alleged to have been assaulted,” Flowers says, “and she is still a Killers fan and, thank heavens, was not assaulted. Her and her friend were there at the gig and were invited by our front of house engineer at the time, and they corroborate that nothing illegal happened and there was no non-consensual thing happening and they’re totally fine. For some reason, which I still don’t quite understand, a woman on our crew was led to believe that an assault had taken place by multiple men and I feel bad for her that she’s carried that with her for the past 11 years, thinking that that was a possibility.”

Has he been aware of anything like that happening on any of the band’s tours? “That kind of behaviour is nothing that I recognised in The Killers’ camp. If you come to a Killers gig, after the gig you’re gonna see Ronnie and a dog, there’s possibly gonna be kids there, there’s pizza, it’s nothing like... if you read the story, it’s like a tale out of Mad Max or something like that... Anything remotely like that in the crew, we would never turn a blind eye to it, Ronnie wouldn’t, Mark wouldn’t, Dave wouldn’t, our tour manager wouldn’t, our assistant tour manager, who is a female and was also there at the time, would not. No one in the band and none of the crew that I know would ever allow anything that even resembled what was alleged to happen.”

Vannucci insists that the names-on-the-list story didn’t happen at all, and venue staff reported no sign of any such activity. Are they saying that Cherrie was the victim of an in-joke from what the investigation calls a “problematic workmate” prone to “sexist remarks”? “Perhaps,” he says, “but I’m not even sure if that happened. This whole thing was a complete ‘what the f***?’ shocker. I felt like it was our duty to get to the bottom of this – if this was true, I wanna roast the people that were involved with this. It’s scary to think that we could be involved in something like that. So I was happy to find out that there was nothing under the rug and this was fabricated.”

Brandon Flowers live on stage performing with The Killers (Rob Loud)

Does that sort of “groupie culture” exist anymore? “I’m certain it still exists,” says Flowers. “It may not be as widespread as it would’ve been in the Seventies and Eighties but I’m sure it exists. It doesn’t exist within my band. Maybe just because we’re getting older, it’s a different environment than some young band might encounter.”

The investigation did acknowledge “crass jokes” among “a small faction of crew” around that time, the sort of behaviour which has made rock music an uncomfortable and unwelcoming place for women to work and perform. Isn’t it long overdue for rock to shed that toxic attitude towards women? “Yeah,” Vannucci agrees. “In the end it’s sort of a mean culture, it’s keeping people down. I love jokes but when it comes to being a bigot or when you’re trying to be malicious, that’s just mean. I don’t want that around us. I’ve never seen it, certainly in our organisation, where it’s been too much of a boys’ club... we’ve been pretty good with sharing the company of ladies, in a nice working way. Our crew are lovely people and anybody who was a problem before, even if they didn’t create a problem, the meanies get canned. If you don’t meet with the vibe you end up falling off.”

Vannucci says the allegations “did raise some flags for us because what if something like this did happen?” Keen to ensure a safe and inclusive working environment, the band claim that sexist behaviour in their camp now leads to dismissal and have vowed to include a HR helpline in future tour team material, something which Flowers hopes “other bands pick up on and can help the entire industry”. Indeed, that a band like The Killers – who, in nobody’s almanac of shameless rock piggery are exactly Mötley Crüe – have found themselves at the centre of a debate about rock’n’roll ethics in 2020 might act as a conversation changer, a sign to an industry rife with outdated attitudes that old-school misogyny will no longer be tolerated.

In her response blog, Cherrie hoped so, and Vannucci agrees. “My hope is that people will treat other people with more respect and kindness,” he says, recalling a South African tour on which he insisted a racist driver was fired. “I’ve got my own bulls*** detector, a s***ty people detector, and the radar is always on… We need to go around saying ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’, holding the door open for ladies, just being respectful. It’s time.”

Has this experience given them an insight into cancel culture? “It’s a fine line,” says Vannucci. “I think it’s situational. I certainly don’t want to make anybody feel unsafe to raise a flag if there’s reason to raise a flag, but I also think things should be investigated and if you’re going to make accusations, make sure they are founded, make sure you do them as soon as possible and clean up the mess.”

A little controversy isn’t going to hold The Killers back, though. Not even the pandemic could. They’ve been enjoying the family pleasures of lockdown, and trips back to Nephi, the small town where a shy and self-conscious teenage Flowers first got into bands like The Smiths and U2 before he blossomed into Vegas’s most gleam-toothed rock ringmaster, have inspired him to crack on with The Killers’ seventh album.

“I’ve gotten quite pricked by nostalgia,” he says, “weirdly Nineties vibrations and ruminations on being a teenager in a town where I felt hopeless. This is the point where I’d usually be on tour promoting and celebrating the record that we just made and, having that swept out from underneath me, I just turned right back to the piano and the studio. I was pleasantly surprised to find that you kinda have this muscle that you’re exercising and massaging and strengthening while you’re writing and then you just go on tour and you stop it. It’s been real interesting to keep that going and a lot of songs have been coming. I predict a really quick turnaround for another record.”

Vannucci, too, is settling in for a long-haul rock lockdown, agreeing with Coachella mastermind Marc Geiger that major events might not return until 2022. “I think that is the absolute best-case scenario. Unless there’s good work in therapeutic drugs or a vaccine, it’s only getting worse. What’s even scarier is the irreparable damages, we don’t know how they work yet. We don’t know what it’s gonna be like in two years’ time. I know someone who’s a triathlete, they got it bad, hospitalised, and even getting up from the couch to grab something is [hard]. They’re negative now, but they have lung damage. I’m happy to stay inside, happy to limit my distance and my exposure. People doing gigs without knowing what the hell this thing is yet, it’s crazy, y’know? I wanna be sure we’re making healthy decisions because this could really be bad for humans.”

For once, The Killers are gazing off to a horizon where the haze is contaminated. But if they keep conjuring Mirages out in the desolate Covid landscape, they get our vote.