Brandon Flowers sits bolt upright in his train seat. So handsome you feel like putting a paper bag over your head the minute you meet him, his teeth a gleaming testament to the might of American dentistry, he is nevertheless not merely visibly uncomfortable but audibly uncomfortable, too. His conversation is punctuated with a high, fluttering giggle that seems to have nothing to do with amusement and everything to do with anxiety. Interviews make Flowers nervous. (A few days later, when I see him at a photoshoot — where a fearless snapper faces the prospect of becoming the first person in history to be charmed to death — Flowers is sweet, endlessly amenable and positively radiates good humor, a change of mood he explains with admirable candor. “I’m a lot more confident in my handsomeness than my wisdom,” he says.)
I have tried to make small talk about his children — married in 2005, he has one son and another due next month, hopefully during a two-week break in The Killers’ touring schedule — and about the festivals The Killers are traipsing around, but Flowers seems no better equipped for small talk than he is for breathing underwater. He answers politely, but monosyllabically, then silence falls over the first-class carriage on Eurostar, which is conveying him to yet another festival, this time in Belgium. His fear of flying is only one among a panoply of traits you might assume would preclude Flowers from a career as an international rock star. Indeed, that is something Flowers neither looks like — he has the face of a wholesome 1950s matinee idol — nor behaves, nor talks like. He is wont to describe The Killers as a “business.” “Well, it is a business. People want their rock stars to be stumbling around and we’re not that way. I can’t help it if I’m businesslike.”
It is a job at which he is awesomely successful. In five years, The Killers have been fast-tracked into the upper echelons of musical superstardom, where U2 and Bruce Springsteen ask him to join them on stage. Meanwhile, artists who once stared down from Flowers’ bedroom wall turn up to pay homage: The Cure’s Robert Smith, David Bowie, Pet Shop Boys, even Morrissey (the latter having apparently recovered after a starstruck teenage Flowers, waiting on his table in a Las Vegas restaurant, attempted to deliver a heartfelt eulogy with his mushroom pizza and was removed by a bodyguard for his trouble). Their 2004 debut album, Hot Fuss, sold more than 7 million copies, was nominated for five Grammys and went to number one in Britain, Australia and Argentina. Its follow-up, 2006’s Sam’s Town, almost perfectly replicated its success: 7 million copies shifted, number one around the world, awards won. At the end of last year, their third album, Day & Age, went three times platinum in the UK alone.
Flowers is very much the band’s public face. General knowledge of the rest of The Killers amounts to: looks like the guy from My Name Is Earl (drummer Ronnie Vannucci), has curly hair (guitarist Dave Keuning) and nothing whatsoever (bass player Mark Stoermer). It’s not as if he hasn’t been interviewed before, which makes his obvious unease all the more peculiar. But then Flowers is a very peculiar kind of rock superstar. He is a practicing Mormon, who claims his devotion to a religion that frowns upon alcohol, tobacco, tattoos, premarital sex and body piercings has only been strengthened by five years in the godless world of rock ’n’ roll. He is a man who refuses even to swear on stage — “It’s just a cheap way to get a rise out of the crowd,” he sniffs — yet swiftly gained music press notoriety for gobbily starting feuds with other bands, among them Radiohead, whom Flowers suggested should try writing some proper songs again, and emo bands such as My Chemical Romance, whose music he described as “dangerous.” He is an Anglophile who briefly considered thumbing his nose at Mormon orthodoxy by getting an Oasis tattoo, but who has taken other US artists to task for being insufficiently patriotic, particularly when it came to their views on the presidency of George W. Bush. “I’m not saying we should be complacent, but you should try and find some hope. Which I didn’t get out of 60,000 kids who aren’t from America screaming, ‘I don’t want to be an American Idiot.’ I didn’t like it.”
He is the youngest of six, born to parents from the same Las Vegas trailer park. His family were so resolutely blue-collar that he literally snorts with incredulity when asked if they were in any way musical or artistic. “No,” he says, as if I’d just asked if his father ever landed on the moon. “My dad worked in a grocery store. His father did as well. Mom worked in a fast food restaurant called Taco Time, which later became my first job as well.”
Nevertheless, life in the Flowers household was far from without incident. His father was an alcoholic who stopped drinking when Flowers was 5, then converted to Mormonism in the 1980s following a religious epiphany, demanding to be baptized so quickly, there was no time to find a church and the ceremony had to be performed in a nearby swimming pool. Flowers watched — “It was great” — and, the odd cigarette or vodka Red Bull, and the business with the Oasis tattoo notwithstanding, has stuck with Mormonism ever since. “It’s a blessing for me. I’ve been thrust into a situation where I’m around a lot of people who don’t believe. I just haven’t been easily persuaded. The older I get, the more comfortable I get with it. Having a child reinforced my belief that we’re created. There’s just no doubt for me, not a thread of doubt in my mind, that there is a God.”
Following his father’s conversion, the family moved from Las Vegas to Nephi, a tiny, Mormon-founded town in Utah. Improbably, it was in Nephi that Flowers discovered music, via his older brother, who gave him his Cure and Smiths cassettes as he replaced them with CDs. There was “never” any sense of youthful rebellion about his love of music — “I didn’t wear black and not talk to other kids or anything” — nor did it feel like something he wanted to do himself: “I never thought it was an option.” Instead, he harbored ambitions of being a professional golfer.
He returned to Vegas at 16 to live with an aunt and at 17 left school, taking a succession of jobs — cleaning golf carts, waiting tables, working as a hotel bellhop — while making tentative forays into putting together a band. It sounds like a rather bleak period — the menial work, the failure of the world to be set alight by his early synthesizer combo Blush Response — but it was anything but. “The great thing about Vegas is the tips,” he says, suddenly animated. “You wake up, you go out to your job and you hustle. You’ve always got this wad in your pocket, you know it’s there, you want to count it all day. It’s exciting. I loved it.”
Still, the music wasn’t going well: Blush Response had broken up, and Flowers found himself in a band with people he delicately describes as “a little more experimental than me.” “This guy sold speed and he was a hooker. He had a son and we would watch his son while he went with women.” He frowns. “I can’t imagine what the mother was like that didn’t have custody of the kid.”
Perhaps understandably, their association was short-lived. Next, Flowers answered an advert Dave Keuning had placed, which mentioned Oasis. They took the name The Killers from a New Order video and together wrote Mr Brightside, which went on to be their first hit. Keen to stand out, Flowers took to wearing make-up on stage and bedecking his keyboard with rhinestones. “The other bands in Las Vegas hated it, they hated us,” he says with what sounds like a note of relish. “They still do. We don’t get much love in Las Vegas. But their girlfriends like us.”
Fittingly, given Flowers’ Anglophilia, they were spotted by a British record label before the US expressed interest. They flew to England — Flowers had never before had a passport — to seemingly instantaneous success: Mr Brightside went into the top 10 and stayed in the charts for 65 weeks. But no sooner had success arrived than dissenting voices were claiming that The Killers’ orthodontically perfect take on alt-rock seemed oddly stilted and contrived. “If you look at us and you hear it, it’s almost too good to be true,” he says flatly, and he has a point: a ready-made pin-up singing songs that sound impossibly commercial. “We have good songs, it sounds perfect, it sounds contrived, but it wasn’t.”
But there was also a sense that people simply thought Flowers was perhaps a little too gimlet-eyed, a little too driven in the pursuit of success for his own good. There was also his refusal to add his voice to the clamor of musical protest surrounding the Iraq war and the Bush presidency. “The height of it all was when you went to a concert and you knew someone was going to say something about George Bush and everybody would be so happy. It’s an easy way to get a cheer. That really irked me.” An interviewer recently got Flowers to admit he supported US President Barack Obama, which makes the Bush stuff a little puzzling — it made people think he was a raving neocon. A nervous giggle: “Yeah, that’s how they spun it.” Wasn’t that annoying? “A bit.” A long pause. “I don’t know enough about politics to talk about it.”
And finally there was The Killers’ sudden physical transformation, around the release of Sam’s Town — make-up and rhinestones abandoned in favor of looking like extras from Deadwood — which was interpreted in some quarters as a cynical attempt to get middle America to like them. Flowers says not — “That was never thought out” — and in any case, if it was, it didn’t work: in the US, Sam’s Town did noticeably worse than their debut. Worse, Day & Age failed to make up the lost ground, which clearly rankles. “How much does it bother me?” he says. “I think about it every day. I’ve thought about it today. I’ve already talked about it today with my press officer.”
Indeed, he still seems to be thinking about it after their performance at the Belgian festival, which by anyone’s standards is a triumph: the crowd sing along, scream, hold up signs bearing messages of undying devotion to Flowers. But Flowers picks apart his performance: a wrong note here, a missed cue there. He hates playing in sunlight, he says. He worries that US audiences won’t be able to work out how huge The Killers are in Britain because they’ve chosen to record their live DVD at London’s Albert Hall rather than a vast stadium.
We repair to the side of the stage to watch Coldplay’s headlining set. Chris Martin goes into overdrive, asking the crowd if they enjoyed The Killers — they did — saying how hard it is to follow such a great band on stage, and getting the audience to sing, “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier,” the deathless refrain from All These Things That I’ve Done, the Killers track that Conservative Party leader David Cameron elected to be shipwrecked with.
I look over at Flowers and notice something extraordinary: nothing. He doesn’t react at all: not a smile, not an aw-shucks shrug. He just looks straight on, impassive to the sound of the biggest band in the world praising him to the skies and thousands of people singing his words. After all, he can’t help it if he’s businesslike.
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
On May 2, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫), at a meeting in support of Taipei city councilors at party headquarters, compared President William Lai (賴清德) to Hitler. Chu claimed that unlike any other democracy worldwide in history, no other leader was rooting out opposing parties like Lai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). That his statements are wildly inaccurate was not the point. It was a rallying cry, not a history lesson. This was intentional to provoke the international diplomatic community into a response, which was promptly provided. Both the German and Israeli offices issued statements on Facebook
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
RSS