Death becomes them
The first time The Killers played Oxegen they fretted whether anyone would turn up to see them. Now they’re sweeping in to headline the main stage. They talk to us about being chased by papparazi, growing up in Middle America and sharing a bill with Bono and, er, Gary Barlow
Stuart Clark, 10 Jul 2009
“That’s where I like being – under the radar!” Dave laughs. “I’m sure the singer getting more attention than the guitarist or the drummer is a problem in some bands, but not The Killers. I actually like the fact that it’s Brandon who gets the paparazzi going after him rather than me. I suspect he feels somewhat differently but, hey, he wanted to be the guy out front!”
Seeing as I’ve got my portable psychiatrist’s couch with me, would Keuning like to hop up on it and tell us about his childhood?
“I’m from Pella, Iowa and am of Dutch descent – hence the name, which gets mispronounced all the time,” he laughs. “Iowa’s the opposite of dust-bowl in that the soil’s really fertile, and we have farms going on for mile after mile after mile that are just full of corn. I’m not particularly a car man, but I recently indulged in a 1979 Firebird Trans Am because it reminded me of staying over at my grandma’s and seeing these guys come to pick up my aunt, who was still living with her, in their Trans Ams and Comaros. I was five or six, and didn’t think anything could match those cars for coolness and mystique.”
That’s how things remained until his teenage years when Keuning spied an Ibanez Destroyer guitar in a local music store window.
“It looked so damn sexy!” he says with a coital glint in his eye. “I was still in high school, so we’ve been together going on 15 years. It’s about the only guitar on Hot Fuss, and still gets used all the time live because otherwise songs like ‘Somebody Told Me’ and ‘All These Things I’ve Done’ just don’t sound right.”
Dave’s first proper band – “as in we played more than two gigs and had people you could loosely describe as ‘fans’” – rejoiced under the name of Pickle and had a bit of a Christian rock thing going on.
“We certainly weren’t like Anvil,” he laughs. “It was me and a bunch of older guys, which was good because they had a work ethic I hadn’t experienced before just fooling around in basements with friends. There was one time when we took our stuff down to this park and played, which inspired a friend of ours to do the same thing the following year with ten bands who had two or three thousand people come to see them. It ended up developing into this mini-Lollapalooza that was still going till quite recently.”
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Stuart Clark
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