Crime Scene Investigation

How did Brandon Flowers, Ronnie Vannucci, Dave Keuning and Mark Stoermer go from the Las Vegas dive bar circuit to selling four million copies of their debut album, Hot Fuss? Stuart Clark talks to the people involved in the making of The Killers.

What a difference a year makes. The Killers came to Oxegen 2004 with just one top 20 hit, ‘Mr. Brightside’, to their credit and the suspicion that they were more style than substance. The word from the record company people with them was that they were nervous about being Saturday’s New Band Stage headliners and pissed off that they were on at the same time as their heroes, The Cure. The band themselves were dead on their feet, with a yawning Brandon Flowers confiding to me backstage that, “All I want to do right now is sleep. I don’t mean to be a whiney rock star, but the last time I got a proper eight hours was Wednesday. As for days off that hasn’t happened since Christmas.”

Knackered or not, it was obvious that there’d been a kid-in-the-sweetshop element to their ten months of non-stop touring.

“What’s been our biggest ‘pinch me, I must be dreaming’ moment?” pondered drummer Ronnie Vannucci. “Playing at the Wiltern Theater in LA with Morrissey and him standing right in front of the stage at soundcheck. You’ve looked up to this guy since you were 12 and there he is eyeballing you!”

If ever there was a case of American blood, English heart this was it!

Given Flowers’ resemblance to a narcoleptic River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho, it was with trepidation, rather than a sense of being about to witness a groundbreaking rock ‘n’ roll moment, that I made my way to the 3,000-capacity tent they were playing in.

My fears couldn’t have been more misplaced. Despite the thousand yard stares, the band proved to be everything that Cap’n Bob and The Cure across the way weren’t – compelling, charismatic and grinning from ear to ear just being there.

“It’s a good thing they’ve no problem with being as big as the Oasis and U2s of this world,” I noted in my review, “because it might just happen!”

For The Killers too it was love at first sight.

“It turned out to be their favourite show of the year, Glastonbury included,” says Siona Ryan, the woman from Lizard King Records who looks after them on this side of the Atlantic. “The thing that particularly overwhelmed them was that even though Hot Fuss was only just out, everybody knew the words. They were tired, but buzzing from all the amazing things they’d done in a six-month period. You’ve got to remember that these were four guys who prior to The Killers had barely left the States, yet alone gone round the festival circuit and met the likes of Morrissey, Bowie and Robert Smith, who they absolutely worship. And when those people started giving them namechecks, god, they were blown away!”

A native of Greystones in County Wicklow, Ryan was one of the welcoming committee when the band made their first gigging trip to London in September 2003.

“They played places like the Camden Barfly, which are essentially pubs,” she continues. “Being so early it was mainly industry heads who were there, including quite a few A&R people who weren’t sure if they were signed or not. Lizard King wasn’t that well known having only been set up the previous year by Martin Heath (former President of Arista UK) and Dominic Hardisty, who’s a complete finance guy.”

The Lizard King A&R man who snapped them up was Ben Durling.

“The first two songs I heard were ‘Mr. Brightside’ and ‘Somebody Told Me’ and they weren’t too dissimilar to what’s on the record, so I thought it was a pretty obvious thing at the time,” Durling recalls. “The whole ‘80s revival was starting to rear its head in the UK and The Killers were potentially a perfect fit. Bands like The Strokes and the White Stripes had also made it cool to be American again, so the timing felt really right. They have such strong, catchy songs and such great lyrics that everybody at the label was confident that Hot Fuss would be successful.”

Not that they’d heard the album in its entirety.

“Lizard King signed The Killers on the strength of five numbers,” Siona Ryan explains, “which meant that ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ came as a very pleasant surprise! It was written after the first EP came out. They’d caused a bit of a stir supporting British Sea Power and doing their own headlining tour, but the big turning point in the UK was them going to Glastonbury last year and gobsmacking a tentful of people with ‘All These Things…’”

Had Ryan expected The Killers to take Glasto by storm like that?

“I’d hoped, but didn’t know for sure until about 20 minutes beforehand when we were backstage and saw thousands and thousands of people beelining for the New Band Tent, which was a bit out of the way,” she proffers. “We were looking at each other thinking, ‘No, no, no!’ I’m not joking, the crowd outside was probably 80 people deep and left the moment The Killers finished. I remember Ronnie and Brandon laughing at us afterwards because we were so overwhelmed. The word of mouth had really tipped over.”

Glastonbury was also the first time that news of The Killers’ burgeoning UK success filtered back to Vegas.

“The reaction up till then had been, ‘Yeah, sure’,” recalls PJ Perez, an old musician buddy of Ronnie Vannucci’s who’s subsequently written about them for the Las Vegas Weekly.

“I don’t know the impression you guys have got, but pre-leaving for Britain they weren’t really that well-known in Vegas. They played in dive bars, English pubs, video poker bars and a now defunct drag queen club, Tramps, which had an ‘80s theme night on Sundays they guested at. They were always going on last after all the other bands who didn’t sound anything like them had played, so the crowds weren’t the greatest. More often than not though, they’d win whoever was there over and get asked back. Their biggest Vegas show would have been the farewell one they did at Tramps to 200 or 300 people.”

Did Perez know from the get-go that The Killers were destined for greatness?

“Not at all,” he chuckles. “Mostly because in the summer of 2002 the line-up was completely different. Dave Keuning was going by the name of Tavian Go, which I think is a David Bowie reference, and instead of Ronnie and Mark you had an 18 year-old drummer called Dell Star and a thirtysomething bassist, Buss Bradley. The only two in the band who clicked were Tavian, aka Dave, and Brandon, who’d appeared on the scene out of nowhere. I know he talks about being in a synth group called Blush Response, but nobody I know ever recalls seeing them play.”

Given the hard time that The Killers have given The Bravery over Sam Endicott being in a ska band, it’s interesting to note that Ronnie Vannucci has a rocksteady past of his own.

“Before hooking up with The Killers, he was in a ska group called Attaboy Skip who sounded a lot like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones,” Perez divulges. “I worked with one of their sax players, and actually approached Ronnie to come and drum with me, but he was already juggling two or three other things and couldn’t.”

Further Hot press investigation reveals that Attaboy Skip’s set included, er, novel versions of Twisted Sister’s ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ and the Ghostbusters theme.

“I don’t think anybody on the local scene was surprised when Dave and Brandon brought the others in to replace Dell Star and Buss Bradley – they didn’t click and were holding The Killers back,” Chavez avers. “They then disappeared, which I took as a sign that they’d broken up. I discovered otherwise three or four months later when I ran into Ronnie in the [University of Nevada, Las Vegas] music department and he told me he was with The Killers now. Things after that took off real quick, with them going to England before I’d had a chance to see the new line-up.”