Earlier this summer, the Killers made headlines performing the biggest show of their career at London’s Wembley Stadium. For two hours, they projected their glam-rock sound onto a grateful crowd of more than 70,000 screaming fans.
The next morning, they awoke to flattering reviews in the British press of how far the band had developed in their stage presence since they first blew up the scene with ‘Mr. Brightside’ in 2003.
“It was amazing, but more of a celebration of the band and the music than a quality show in some ways,” soft-spoken bassist Mark Stoermer tells us. “For me, it was a really big stage and hard to hear… but it was one of those things that I’m glad we did and crossed off our list.”
It was also their chance to thank the country that first embraced them back when they were nobodies. After releasing their debut album, Hot Fuss, in 2004, the indie band was booking tours in the United Kingdom way before the Las vegas, Nevada band were even on their home country’s radar.
To show their appreciation, the Killers performed a one-time only anthem, ‘Wembley Song,’ that paid tribute to British fans and the 90-year history of the hallowed stadium, which has seen the likes of U2, Queen, the Rolling Stones and the band’s own self-professed inspiration, Oasis, perform.
“‘Mr. Brightside’ had you shakin’ your heads, when you heard we were from Vegas, because you were positive it was Sheffield or Camden,” frontman Brandon Flowers crooned to his British audience on stage. “But that didn’t matter – the seed was planted, you took us in like your own, and now we’re bound by tradition.”
“I don’t know, maybe because at first our sound was quintessentially British,” says Stoermer, ruminating on why their first big break came in the UK. “The UK tends to embrace newer music more often and more widely, and I think they gravitate towards melody and songs about sensibility.”
After selling more than six million copies of Hot Fuss, releasing two more albums and garnering accolades aplenty – famed music magazine NME alone gave them five awards, and all of their albums have hit the UK number-one spot and been top-10 in the US – The Killers took four years to work on another project (two of which were spent away from each other), much to the frustration of their more rabid fans.
Their latest work, Battle Born, came out last September. With hits like ‘Runaways,’ they seem to be moving farther away from the quintessentially indie English sound that their fans first fell in love with.
“I think there have been continuous elements through all four albums,” says Stoermer. “But we’ve gone a little bit more rock and our songs have become a little bit more personal in terms of storytelling. As we grew up and became older, we changed in a lot of ways. It’s just happened.”
Battle Borndeparts from grungy angst and moves towards embracing the harsh landscape of their hometown and the big, sweeping sounds of wide-open America – the band has been getting compared to New Jersey good ol’ boy Bruce Springsteen. Stoermer, who moved to Las Vegas at the age of three, says those roots were never far beneath the surface to begin with.
“You can’t ever completely separate where you’re from with who you are… I think it’s always in our music and artwork, a little bit of the West,” he says. “We grew up with big skies and mountains, plus the glitz-and-glamour, 24-hour lifestyle of Las Vegas… I’m sure it has affected us, but it’s hard to know it if you don’t know any different.”
For their first-ever Beijing appearance at the beginning of October (the band were scheduled to play here in 2011 but had to pull out due to illness), expect the set to turn the Mastercard Center into a spectacle of stadium-sized synth pop and intimate Americana atmospherics, with new songs followed by old favorites. A solid performance is all we ask.
// Oct 1, 8pm, RMB280-1280. ThinkPad Space, 69 Fuxing Lu, Haidian District 北京海淀区复兴路69号 www.damai.cn
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