Death becomes them

I’ve never heard a major rock star say they’re not looking forward to ‘X’ gig or ‘Y’ festival, but Dave Keuning is so giddy about The Killers returning to Oxegen you can’t help wondering whether he’s got a nubile young lady stashed away in Kildare somewhere.

“Who’s been talking?” the corkscrew-haired 32-year-old deadpans. “No, I haven’t got a secret Irish girlfriend… more’s the pity! Oxegen’s a big deal because it’s one of the first European festivals we played when we came over from Vegas in 2004. We only had one hit – ‘Mr. Brightside’ – and were worried in case no one showed. But the tent was packed with people screaming out the words to songs we didn’t think they knew. It was that night we thought, ‘Hey, something’s happening here!’ Oxegen more so than Glastonbury even was the highlight of our summer.”
Ah, shucks! No mere back-room boy, it was Keuning – then masquerading as Tavian Go – who in 2002 placed the “seeking to start or join a band influenced by The Beatles, Beck, Oasis, The Smashing Pumpkins and U2” small ad, which Brandon Flowers answered. Does he ever remind the guys that, when all’s said and done, The Killers are his band?
“Interesting historical interpretation, but I’m not sure they’d agree! One of the reasons The Killers works so well is because it’s a democracy – although some members are more equal than others! I’ve given up arguing with Brandon over the fact that three or four of my favourite Killers songs will never be heard because he doesn’t like them. He always uses the, ‘It’s me who’s got to sing ‘em’ argument, which is precisely what I’d do if I was him! I’ve got a computer with probably 60 Killers songs that were before Hot Fuss. Some of them are rough recordings, others are pretty much completed demos, which failed to make the cut. If we were to release a box-set, I imagine a chunk of those would be on it.”
While Brandon has had to get used to having his life forensically examined by tabloid Gil Grissoms, Keuning has managed to keep a remarkably low profile for a man who’s had a hand in selling 15 million records.
“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.”
Does Dave ever wonder what life would be like now if he hadn’t left Pella in 2000 and headed out to Vegas?
“Well, one of the Pickle guys who didn’t move away now has 11 children, so I could’ve been knee-deep in diapers,” he smiles. “We’re good friends still, and try to meet up whenever I’m back in Iowa.”
More biographical details are provided by ‘Good Night, Travel Well’, their current album Day & Age’s closing song, which Dave wrote in response to his mother dying.
“That really was straight from the heart,” he notes. “It’s necessarily dark, but also a celebration. I’m not sure how widely it’s known because people don’t seem to get to the end of the record anymore. ‘Good Night, Travel Well’, ‘Everything Will Be Alright’, ‘Why Do I Keep Counting?’ – they’re three of my favourites but because they’re track 10 or 11 they kinda get overlooked. ‘Why Do I Keep Counting?’ was what we thought would be the big singalong from Sam’s Town, but we played it a few times and it never really happened.”
What are the songs in the current set that he’s getting the biggest buzz from playing?
“I was ho-hum about ‘This Is Your Life’ during the songwriting process, but now I love it. I haven’t got tired of ‘Spaceman’ yet – that really stood out when we were getting the material together for Day & Age. ‘Human’ I still like, and ‘Neon Tiger’ has been growing on me recently. It’s more fun to play live than it is on CD, which is a little heretical of me to say but I like to be honest about these things!”
That 1979 Firebird Trans Am isn’t the only thing Keuning’s lavished his royalty money on.
“Going on eBay for the first time I realised you can have all the stuff you wanted as a kid… and I shall! I’ve now got all eight Star Wars light-sabers, plus quite a few action figures and other memorabilia. Next I’m going to fill the holes in my baseball card collection!”
Oxegen will have to go it some to replace February 19 as The Killer’s favourite day of 2009. That’s when Brandon took part in the Brit Awards tribute to the Pet Shop Boys, and afterwards all four of them performed at the War Child 15th birthday bash in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire.
“It was us doing eight songs followed by Coldplay who also did half a set, and then we all came back for the encore, which also featured Bono and Gary Barlow,” Dave explains.
Were they familiar with Take That prior to the War Child bash?
“I knew their hit song, ‘Back For Good’, but not the individual names of the members. Having Bono sing, ‘I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier’ during ‘All These Things I’ve Done’, which was the last song played, was the most surreal thing that’s ever happened to us. Bono, Coldplay, The Killers – not a bad little band!”
I’d certainly pay a fiver to see them on a Wednesday night at Eamonn Doran’s. Having spent the last six years on the album/tour/album/tour treadmill, The Killers, the lazy bastards, are looking forward to grabbing themselves some quality beach time.
“I imagine we’ll be touring Day & Age until mid-2010, and we’re then for sure going to take a year off – maybe longer, we’ll see,” Dave reveals. “We had six months off after Sam’s Town, three weeks of which I got to spend at home in San Diego, so it’d be nice to go off on an extended vacation.”
And then?
“I’ll make some demos and collect some ideas, which I’ll let the other guys hear if they’re good enough! Something I’ve wanted to do for a while is learn a hundred of my favourite songs on guitar, starting with the whole of Appetite For Destruction! For the style of music it is, that album hasn’t been matched since. Our dressing room at Live 8 was next to Velvet Revolver’s, so I got to meet Slash, Duff and Matt and generally behave like a fan boy!”
You read it first here, folks – the next Killers studio album will be a Vahallan blend of coruscating powerchords, thunder on the tundra drums and "squeeze me, babe, till the juice runs down my leg” vocals.
“You know, of all the routes we could go down I don’t think it’ll be the heavy metal one,” he says to the relief of Killers fans everywhere. “It’ll be interesting though to see in what way, shape or form learning those songs influences me.”
Talking of influences, there’s been persistent talk of a Killers covers record, which one imagines would include a healthy smattering of Duran Duran, Joy Division, Oasis, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, David Bowie and The Cars songs.
“You could be right about some of those, although if we do go ahead with a covers album there’ll be plenty of surprises in there as well. We’ve half-recorded one or two, but if and when it’ll come to fruition I don’t know. We’ve talked about doing it on the road – we’ve a couple of mics, a little drum-set, a bass amp and a guitar amp in the back right now, and Ronnie and me both know how to use Logic, so maybe.”
Like most right-thinking Americans, Mark considers the world to be a shinier, happier place now that the Obamas have hung their curtains at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“We happened to be in Chicago on the inauguration day, which was second only to DC in terms of people partying on the streets,” he concludes. “You’ve basically got two groups of people in the States right now – the uptight, bitter Republicans and the rest who are a lot more optimistic about the future than they were pre-the election. We’re definitely in the latter camp.”

Click here to read some of the best quotes Killers' singer Brandon Flowers has given Hot Press over the years.