Brandon Flowers, La Riviera, Madrid

Fellow music fans of Ireland, it’s come to my attention that we’re not getting our full gigular whack.
Here we are being asked to pay top dollar for tickets yet none of our venues has a giant palm tree growing up through the middle of the dancefloor like they do in La Riviera, a futuristic 2,000-capacity Madrid club that’s jammers tonight for the visit of Señor Flowers. It’s not so much daylight robbery as daylight shrubbery.
Almost as excruciating as that pun is Rewards, a.k.a. Chairlift co-founder Aaron Pfenning, whose plinkty-plink synthpop meanders around aimlessly before going nowhere in particular.
Aimless isn’t a word that can be applied to Brandon Flowers who with an, ahem, killer new band and two no-holds-barred female backing singers looks and sounds tonight like a man reborn.
The nervy performer of old has been replaced by a swaggering Vegas showman who cracks jokes, tries out a bit of schoolboy Spanish and generally looks like he’s having a blast on stage.
An acoustic encore take on ‘When We Were Young’ (good) and a cover of Kim Carnes’ ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ (even better) aside, the set is drawn entirely from Flowers’ solo Flamingo album, which is just fine with the crowd who know every word to every song.
Unfortunately, only a couple of them – ‘Crossfire’ and ‘Was It Something I Said’ – would be able to stand up to the likes of ‘Mr. Brightside’ or ‘Somebody Told Me’ in a fist fight.
In other words, as good as Brandon was tonight, he’d be even better with the rest of The Killers.