The Full Interview: The Killers talk Trump, Bowie, Bono & Las Vegas

"Ahh man, you didn’t bring one for me? Come on!” As Hot Press enters a sleek, dimly-lit meeting room in the basement of London’s Soho Hotel, Ronnie Vanucci Jr. of The Killers looks enviously at the glass of Asahi lager in my hand. The plan had actually been to have polished off said beverage before the interview began, but the schedule suddenly shifted and their record company publicist summoned me unexpectedly from the bar. “Do you mind going in early? The guys are free to talk to you now.”

The drummer might be disappointed that I haven’t brought him a drink but, as a Mormon teetotaler, singer Brandon Flowers is somewhat less bothered. Three days on from their acclaimed July 8th headline appearance at the British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park (a fortnight before that they rocked Glastonbury with a surprise appearance on the John Peel stage), the weary-looking Nevadans – aged 41 and 36, respectively – are midway through a morning of promo for their as yet unreleased fifth studio album, Wonderful Wonderful. It’s several months before their home town of Las Vegas will be struck with tragedy when a gunman open fire on a crowd at a country rock festival in the heart of the famous strip (see panel).

We’ve all met before so they’re relaxed and friendly, seemingly happy to be talking to a native English speaker after a couple of hours of being interrogated by Japanese journalists. Wearing faded jeans and a white t-shirt, the bearded, straight-talking Ronnie comes across like an American everyman, the kind of guy you’d bump into in the hardware section of a Walmart.

With a slick black suit and white-spotted black silk shirt, the chisel-cheeked Brandon is instantly identifiable as a showman (possibly down to his Las Vegas blood). Despite the international fame and adulation that record sales in excess of 22 million bestows, however, the softly-spoken singer still has a somewhat endearing tendency to emit a high-pitched nervous giggle every time he’s asked a question.

They’re anxious to know whether I’ve actually heard the new album, and are visibly appreciative when informed that I’ve listened to it six or seven times. “Oh, thanks for that,” says Brandon. “Well, you’re the first person we’ve met today that’s heard it more than once! Everyone’s like, ‘I heard it this morning’. Uuuuh!” He shakes his head despairingly.

Recorded at studios in California and their native Nevada, produced by Irishman Garrett ‘Jackknife’ Lee, and featuring ten tasty slices of slick, anthemic and sometimes dreamy synth-rock, Wonderful Wonderful is aptly titled, possibly their most vital album yet. They brought out a ‘Best Of’ collection called Direct Hits in 2013 , and a charity album of Christmas songs called Don’t Waste Your Wishes in November 2016 (all profits went to the Bono-headed Product Red campaign). But, those releases aside, it will be their first proper studio offering since 2012’s opinion-dividing Battle Born.

They simultaneously raise quizzical eyebrows when asked why the five-year hiatus. “Man, we’ve been really busy,” Brandon explains. “We toured Battle Born for, like, two years. We released the ‘Best Of’, released the Christmas album, did solo records, and all that stuff. So it doesn’t feel like a hiatus for us. It probably takes the better part of 15 months, 18 months, to get a new record in the can.”

So how was the process of writing Wonderful Wonderful?

“It’s difficult with any record, really,” he says, shrugging. “You know, I started to realise, you could just go in and write 10 or 11 songs and say, ‘There’s our record’, but we just have a different mentality. It’s tough when you’ve got a back catalogue, and you’re trying to eclipse what you’ve already done. You know what I mean? Let alone all the other bastards for the last 50 years that have written all the great songs. It’s tough! You know, it’s tough to just say, ‘It’s 10 songs and here’s our record’.”

So how many songs did you write for the album?

“A lot, we had a lot,” he smiles, nodding his head. “And you always hear people say, ‘Oh, we wrote this many and that many’, but we really did write a lot, but we didn’t quite… we never finished all of those, you know? It’s really just waiting for the record to emerge. Jacknife was really instrumental in helping us see the light.”

The Northside Dubliner – famed for his production work with the likes of U2, REM, Snow Patrol, One Direction, Robbie Williams and Taylor Swift – was drafted in on Bono’s personal recommendation.

“Yeah, I spoke to Bono a little bit,” Brandon confesses. “I sought it out. He’s been withholding the ‘Bono talk’ from me!”

To the uninitiated, the ‘Bono talk’ is reportedly the U2 singer’s elderstateman-like golden rules of celebrity which he is fond of dishing out to rock star greenhorns (sample advice: ‘Thou Shalt Not Have An Entourage’, ‘Thou Shalt Only Move House On The Live Album’). Courtney Love first told your correspondent about this some years ago – but when I later asked the U2 frontman himself, he claimed to know nothing of it.

Brandon smiles when I tell him this. “That’s funny. Yeah, maybe it’s just some kind of weird folklore that’s out there – but I do definitely look up to him, and that’s not been anything that I’ve been shy about. So I reached out to him when I was struggling with writer’s block, I guess. And one of my problems was what I just talked about earlier, was just how much material there is, and how many great things have already been done, and just what do we have to offer? And what I’ve come to find from more people I talk to is that everybody, I think, is overwhelmed at some point and feels like that, you know. But he also helped suggest Jacknife as a producer, so yeah it was great.”

They were extremely impressed with the producer’s work ethic. As Ronnie explains, “I tried to get Jackknife to drink, but he’s just straight edge – eats right and tries to get sleep – but there’s no… I don’t know what he does. 90 per cent of the time, he’s in such an energetic, chipper mood, he’s working 17-hour days. And a couple of times we ran him straight into the fucking ground. But it took a lot.”

“You start usually in the studio around 12, but he wants to get in there at 9am,” adds Brandon. “You know, to maybe sort through what we did the night before, or whatever, and then he’ll go until 3am. He’ll go all the way. We have no idea how he does it!”

He wasn’t disappearing into the studio bathroom every 20 minutes? “No, he wasn’t!” he laughs. “Well that’s the thing, we were like, ‘Is this guy…?’ We were looking for signs! There were no signs! All we could see was, like, guacamole, cigarettes, bottled water. What the fuck is this guy doing?”

Do you ever party hard as a band?

“Brandon doesn’t drink,” says Ronnie. “I still drink, I don’t do drugs. I had an uncle that taught me about drugs, and it didn’t work out well for him. But I don’t drink as much as I used to, just because if I have two whiskies, which is usually where I like to just go, I can feel it the next day. I’m 41… getting old. But you still feel it, you’re not as resilient as you were, where you could just go drinking the next day and shake off a headache by noon. Now it kills you for a day or two.” Recording initially began with Ryan Tedder and other producers in Los Angeles before Jackknife took the helm in September 2016. How long did the album take to actually record?

“Well, when Brandon said 18 months to get a record in the can, that’s sort of inclusive of the writing process,” explains Ronnie. “For over almost a year, we just would go back and forth from Jackknife’s little studio in Topanga Canyon to our own place in Winchester (Battle Born Studios), and to another place in Vegas. We ended up doing a lot of it at this recording studio in downtown Vegas. Just a little place behind a record shop.”

Brandon looks as though he’s just been reminded of this. “Oh yeah! That was nice. I forgot about that. It was a nice break. We needed to get out of Battle Born.” He starts to laugh. “Some people go to Morocco, we drove two miles to this other studio! We both still have places in Vegas so it was literally just down the road. But it’s nice…it was a nice change.”

“Yeah, it was,” Ronnie agrees. “It was nice being steeped in downtown Vegas. I think it did something. We were looking for a change of venue and a new spot – and this place, 11th Street Records is what it’s called, I think did something. It certainly helped develop themes for the record a little bit. Especially ‘The Man’, I think. That’s sort of where ‘The Man’ Petri-dish was.”

“It’s on Fremont Street,” Brandon adds. “It’s like the real iconic Vegas strip at night – we’d leave to go walking, you could walk to restaurants and things like that. Seeing that quintessential Las Vegas, it was really cool.”

Speaking of which, the highly cinematic Tim Mattia-directed video for retro-funk first cut ‘The Man’ depicts Vegas in all of its beautiful neon-soaked trashiness. Brandon stars in the visual, playing the various types of macho men to be found strutting down the strip – from trailer trash meatheads to flashy stage performers to unlucky cowboy gamblers. What they all have in common is an exaggerated sense of their own importance: “” Despite their contrasting lives and socioeconomic status, however, they’re all similarly flawed... and equally unlucky at the blackjack tables.

How much of that kind of behaviour did you witness growing up in Vegas?

“Those are like our uncles and things,” Brandon replies, smiling. “Yeah, it’s closer than you realise,” says Ronnie, scratching his beard. “My Dad gambled away his inheritance – well, not his inheritance, but his savings. He didn’t have inheritance, he wasn’t anything but… he gambled my inheritance! Yeah, so yeah, it happens.”

All of the members of the band – including guitarist Dave Keuning and bassist Mark Stoermer – have worked in the Vegas casinos in their youth. Did the antics they witnessed put them off becoming gamblers themselves? “I guess all of us have that experience,” Brandon muses. “It helps. Usually you either learn from it or you follow in their footsteps, and we’ve all been lucky – all of us seem to have learned our lesson from people like that. Not just strangers, either. My uncle, my Dad’s brother, and even my Dad, too – it’s funny, my Mom was able to shield you from things – your parents.”

A slightly haunted look crosses his face and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat before continuing. “You know, I’d get these glimpses – there’s this restaurant I like to go to, this really terrible casino on Boulder and Henderson called The Skyline Hotel. It’s just so… I wouldn’t necessarily recommend anybody to go there, but I go there, I think it’s just nostalgic. Like, I just had this flashback of driving up and down the parking lot. My Mom getting out of bed and I was asleep and we were going up and down, and going slowly up and down the parking lot, and I just realised, it just hit me when I’m 30 years old or whatever – we were looking for my Dad!”

He laughs and shakes his head at the memory. “That’s what we were doing! And so, it’s Vegas, you know – there are some seedier sides to it that we’ve all witnessed.”

Ronnie nods his agreement. “Yeah, it’s high highs and low lows. It’s like that.”

Another standout track on the album, ‘Some Kind of Love’, finds Brandon singing over a dreamily ambient composition of Brian Eno’s. The singer had requested permission to use the music a few years previously only to be informed that Eno had no interest. He ultimately discovered that the legendary English musician, producer and artist had never even been approached about it.

“No, he hadn’t even been asked and I was told that he had turned me down,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.

That’s a pretty horrible thing to have happened!

“It’s terrible, yeah,” he nods. “Well, it sounds on paper not so bad – but it really had an effect on me. So I think about, you know… it was something that I had to overcome in my life. And it’s almost funny that it wasn’t even real. But we’re really happy with how that song turned out.”

They didn’t actually meet Eno, just speaking over the phone instead. “We got on great, just on the phone. I was kinda scared of him, and finally got to talk to him on the phone and he was great. He got sent the song, we had people hounding him. Daniel Lanois and Anton Corbijn and Bono were all texting him about it. Finally I got him on the phone – and he loves the song, and we got permission to do what we wanted with it, you know, and it was such a relief and a beautiful thing all at once.”

When I mention that Eno is occasionally spotted in Sheridan’s Wine Bar in my hometown of Galway, Ronnie’s ears prick up. “Galway, that’s not like a really big golf town now, is it?”

Well, I suppose there are plenty of golf courses there. Actually, Donald Trump has a big golf resort in the neighbouring county of Clare.

The drummer winces slightly and nods. “Oh… nice.”

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So what’s your take on the controversial POTUS?

“Ahh…,” Brandon sighs. “I mean, you could see where this was headed with our obsession with celebrity and things like that, for something like this to happen. So you could say it didn’t totally take us by surprise. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not frustrated, you know.”

They both look slightly uncomfortable. “I think, I mean, everybody… he’s so easily bashed,” says Ronnie. “You know, he’s just such an easy target. And I definitely don’t wanna… I’ve never been the type of guy to, you know, to follow that sort of trend. I think he’s probably just a good old boy with a lot of money, with a lot of ideas, and he just isn’t familiar with the decorum of Presidency probably. And just a relatively normal guy. I can’t say that I would… You know, how much I would change if I were President? So he’s such an easy sort of target.”

Well, if Trump extended an invite, would The Killers play the White House at the moment?

“Well, ‘The Killers play the White House’, it isn’t like we’re playing the White House because we directly endorse anything,” he points out. “We’re playing the White House because we’re Americans.”

“We played the White House on the 4th of July about seven or eight years ago,” Brandon recalls, “and, obviously there was a totally different outlook on the country – but it was for veterans, and for people that served, and things like that. It wasn’t like we were performing personally for Barack Obama. You’re supposed to support your president, we’re all taught that growing up, but it is – you know, it is difficult, and like I said earlier, we’re just as frustrated with him being the face of our country as everybody else.”

You obviously don’t really like talking about politics...

Ronnie laughs. “Yeah, just… I don’t know shit about politics. It’s such a weird science – and a low science if you ask me.”

The conversation takes a strange segue into a discussion of the 1985 US comedy Weird Science, UK band Bastille’s use of samples from it on their last album, and the death in February of one of that movie’s stars, Bill Paxton.

“Paxton played the asshole big brother,” Ronnie recalls with a heavy sigh. “He died at 61. It’s too soon.”

Of course, a lot of big names have passed away in recent times. One of these, at least, was definitely a massive influence on The Killers. “Yeah, David Bowie had a huge influence on a lot of our stuff,” Brandon acknowledges. “And you know what else, even bigger than that, I think he influenced a lot more of the people that influenced me.”

The likes of The Smiths and Depeche Mode?

“Yeah, The Smiths, and it’s funny – I didn’t pile any of it together until later on. Depeche Mode – another huge influence on me. Again, Morrissey and The Smiths – huge. People like the New York Dolls and all the others – a lot of their roads lead back to Bowie. You know, it wasn’t until I was 19 or 20 that I put two and two together and bought Hunky Dory, and that had a huge impact on me. And I OD’d on him for sure in my early twenties, and hadn’t listened to him a lot since.

“But then, again when Lou Reed died, it was a similar thing,” he continues. “It’s just funny, you just get this emotion coming that you don’t expect. Like, pouring my cereal and like crying (laughs). I didn’t expect that from hearing that Lou Reed had died. So yeah, Bowie had a similar impact – it’s sad when anyone like that, that’s contributed and enriched your life, goes.”

A more recent celebrity death had a big impact on Ronnie. “I didn’t think I’d react the way I did but I got… it sucked when Chris Cornell died, weirdly. It was such a weird feeling that overcame me, because it was that sort of era in time where I was listening to a lot of their music maybe. Yeah, that’s terrible, too. It sucks.”

Brandon nods. “I think if you haven’t been thinking about them, it all comes rushing in and it’s magnified their influence on your life, even if it’s just for a brief moment. And I had a similar thing with Leonard Cohen. I’m not a massive fan. I mean, I’m a fan but I don’t have every record – but I started singing ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ just to myself in a car on the day that I heard. And I just was overwhelmed with gratitude. There’s a line in that song that just blows me away, where he’s thanking a guy ‘for the trouble you took from her eyes’. And it’s like, ‘Whoooa!!!’ This line is so crazy to think that you would thank someone that took your woman for a little while because he made her happy again and you didn’t.”

The later lyrics go, “And you treated my woman to a flake of your life/ and when she came back she was nobody’s wife.”

“Yeah, there’s another line that goes, ‘I thought it was there for good so I never tried’. It’s so awesome, and I was just thankful for that. So I wouldn’t have had that without it, so I don’t know. There’s good things that come out!”

How many of your musical heroes have you gotten to meet over the last few years?

“We’ve been really lucky in that we’ve met almost all of them,” he enthuses. “It’s incredible. Like, Bowie came and saw us. Bowie saw us early on in New York and that was a real highlight for us, obviously. You know, even when we were writing Hot Fuss, even, not just his ‘70s stuff, Heathen had come out and had a huge impact on us. The bassline for ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ is directly ripped from a song on Heathen. We were really listening to that stuff and it was incredible to have him come to a gig. And [Tony] Visconti came with him to the gig, talking about T-Rex, and we were like, ‘This is crazy!’”

“Yeah, we got to hang with Visconti for a while there,” says Ronnie. “It was so crazy. He’s cool. He’s still doin’ great stuff.”

We’re speaking less than two months after the cowardly terrorist attack on the Ariana Grande show at Manchester Arena. As a world touring act playing similar-sized venues, what are their thoughts on that?

“It crosses my mind [that something could happen],” Brandon admits. “Look, for the most part, I think once we’re out there we aren’t thinking about it. I guess in some way that’s a victory, but still really it’s sad, you know. It’s terrible when it happens anywhere. Whether it’s on the street, or at a gig, or an airport or whatever it is. What else can you say?”

Their publicist enters the room and signals that we’ve just five minutes left. Talk turns back to the album. If their previous offerings were definite arena-fillers, Wonderful Wonderful seems to be aiming for more of a stadium sound. Were they consciously upping the sonic ante on this outing?

“Yeah, I think we always implement the thought of crafting a record with the live scenario,” says Ronnie. “You know, even on this one, we used the studio more as a tool this time around. I mean, what we do is… we just make records, and we tour. So it’s a big component to what we do. So that’s in our thoughts. We didn’t go ‘make any stadium songs’ or anything like that, but it’s certainly always in our mind.”

The album features a couple of oddities, most notably ‘Tyson vs. Douglas’, a song about Mike Tyson’s infamous 1990 defeat at the gloves of Buster Douglas. There’s also the melancholic closing track ‘Have All The Songs Been Written?’, which almost sounds like a swansong.

“Well, there’s definitely a theme,” says Brandon. “There’s maybe more so than on any other record, and it’s something I’m trying to figure out how to convey without just spilling everything, you know, because you want people to be able to insert themselves in there. But basically, I was struggling to figure out what I’m singing about, am I just trying to write hits, what am I doing here? And I realised that I’m most happy on stage, when we are singing songs that are coming from a real place, and that have connected with the people out there.

“And so, I realised I wanted to do that more on this record than I ever have, and I was able to do that more on this record than I ever have,” he continues. “And so I had to sing about what was going on in my life, and my wife was a big part of that obviously. Which again, I still haven’t totally figured this out …”

He falters slightly before continuing. “I’m not sure how to say this, but on Wonderful Wonderful I use her life as drought as a symbol for her life. That’s where you enter the record, and it feels like this, and, and she’s waiting for the storm, or waiting for the rain. And I love that imagery that we were able to use. And it’s just tough without giving away too much. I just don’t know, I’m trying to walk that line.” Have you ever cried on stage?

“Yeah, our song ‘Dustland Fairytale’ gets me every now and then,” he admits, looking slightly surprised at the question. “It took it out of me at Hyde Park at the weekend. I had to… It was my kids’ first Killers concert.”

Brandon has three sons – Ammon (9), Gunnar (7) and Henry (6) – with his wife Tana Mundkowsky. “My eldest has seen some solo gigs and soundchecks, but we’re usually on too late. But they were screwed up on UK time so they were staying up later. And the song’s about their Grandma and their Grandpa, and they don’t know them. They never met my Mom, only my oldest boy did, but he was only two. And so, something about that combination and that song right there got me. So it happens. They were real close, they were right on the side of the stage.”

As I gather my things and prepare to leave, I ask Ronnie have his children ever witnessed a Killers show. “Nah, I don’t have kids, man,” he says, shaking my hand farewell. Then he smiles slyly. “Maybe somewhere in Ireland…”

The Killers on the Las Vegas Massacre

Shortly after the interview was conducted, the Las Vegas mass-shooting occurred, leading Brandon Flowers to write a public letter about the deaths...

“I’m a Vegas boy. I always have been and - even though I just moved my wife and kids to Utah - I always will be. This past Sunday on a flight home from Australia, I flew over my hometown. Forehead to the window I looked down on Las Vegas and felt a prick of nostalgia. I thought about my mother buried below, I thought about my friends in Henderson, and I even traced Flamingo road down to where it meets the 95 and pinpointed my high school, Chaparral. I could see the city as a whole, but I couldn’t look close enough to see what was about to unfold. “It’s hard to believe it’s real,” he added. “My prayers go out to those whose lives were taken and to everyone else affected by this nightmare. I’m devastated for my community and for all of the people who gather together to see live music. Some of the happiest moments of my life have happened at concerts. They are a rite of passage, a holy communion, or just the kind of escape from the stress and the grind of daily life that so many people need. My heart swells when I hear the stories of people putting their lives on the line to help each other - defying the stereotypes of what people say Las Vegas is all about. We’re all long lost brothers and sisters. I miss my town, I miss my mom, I miss these victims I didn’t even know, but I look forward to getting together with you real soon to keep their memory alive.”

Wonderful Wonderful gets a live airing in the Dublin 3Arena (November 16) and Belfast SSE Arena (17)