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Slaying them in Europe
The Killers play to 60,000 in the U.K., 300 in the ’Peg
John Kendle
On Saturday, Aug. 21, The Killers played to 60,000 or so people
at the V Festival in the U.K.
On Aug. 26, the Las Vegas quartet landed on the cover of the London-based
New Musical Express, probably the most influential weekly music
paper in the world.
This week the band hit No. 1 on the NME’s singles chart
with All These Things That I’ve Done, the latest release
from the group’s aptly named debut album, Hot Fuss.
Next week The Killers play the West End Cultural Centre in Winnipeg
— capacity 300.
Welcome to the story of the latest rock act to go over huge in
the U.K. while scarcely making a dent on the North American music
scene.
That The Killers have become hugely popular across the water is
no great surprise. The band’s sound is a modern distillation
of synth- and keyboard-fuelled pop music that recalls the halcyon
days of New Order, Depeche Mode, mid-period Cure or even Berlin-era
Bowie, and British audiences have always embraced this sort of
music more readily than guitar-centric North Americans.
Still, the stunning pace of The Killers’ rise to the top
of the charts in England has surprised even the band, which was
only formed in late 2002, when singer Brandon Flowers responded
to an ad placed by guitarist Dave Keuning in a small Vegas paper.
A year later the band had a British deal with a label called Lizard
King, which was followed in short order by a worldwide contract
with Island. Hot Fuss was released just over two months ago, so
Keuning admits the group has had very little time to understand
what’s happening to it.
“That’s cool,”
he says when Uptown informs him that All These Things… has
hit No. 1. “I didn’t know that. That’s incredible.
I always seem to be the last to know these things.
“But
yeah, the speed of this thing has been so very fast,” he
says from the band’s tour bus, which is on the I-5 somewhere
between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“I think it’s
because of the way it’s set up over there. The towns are
close together, everyone watches the same few TV channels and
listens to the same few radio stations and the music press is
amazing, so if they like you and if you’re good, you can
do very well very quickly.”
The other amazing thing about The Killers is that such a huge-yet-refined
pop/rock sound has emerged from Las Vegas which, apart from its
obvious attractions, isn’t exactly a burgeoning, progressive
entertainment mecca. Most music people view the Vegas scene as
simply an extension of the SoCal punk world.
“That’s
about it,” Keuning says. “Except with more dumb people.
You’ve got your metal, your rap-metal, punk and emo and
that’s about 90 per cent of the scene in Vegas. And there’s
not really a lot of places to play, which hurts a lot of bands.”
The fact Keuning and Flowers wound up finding each other in Sin
City — they are joined in the quartet by bassist Mark Stoermer
and drummer Ron Vannucci — was probably likely given the
pair’s mutual interest in British music.
The instant connection was what startled them.
“We didn’t
even really know each other, and once we talked we found that
the music we listened to wasn’t exactly the same, but there
were a bunch of song ideas that just worked immediately.”
North American response to Hot Fuss has not been so hot off the
mark — but Keuning hopes that, now the group is on its first
proper tour of the continent, it will be able to win fans and
sell albums.
“It’s work you have to do here, and
hopefully this will pay off, too,” he says.
For more info see our What’s
Up entertainment listings. |
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Uptown
Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News