I went that night, and I’d never heard their music before, though they were starting to become all the rage. I was assigned to interview the band that night for People magazine. I ended up talking to them one by one in a bathroom because the opening act came on and it was too loud to talk in the dressing room.
Looking back, some of my notes are funny now. I asked Dave why he seemed to be grumpy that day. "Not grumpy," he said, leaning back onto the white
tiled wall. "Just TIRED."
During the photo shoot, the photographer asked for more movement from the guys, and they did their best without complaining. From my notebook:
“A half hour into it, Ronnie launches
into David Bowie's "Modern Love," and soon the rest of the band follows. They begin to have fun, and they don't complain at all during the one and a half hour shoot.
These guys strike you as still innocent, as yet almost untouched by superstardom. This is probably largely because they spend most of their time going from airplane to tour bus to darkened venue to hotel room and back to the bus.
They're also quite dull by rock star standards. "We
have goals and we want nothing to get in the way,"
Ronnie tells me. "We don't do drugs, and we have
learned to barely drink."
I have interviewed A LOT of famous people and too many are NOT like this. The younger they are, sometimes the worse they are, because they don’t understand most stars get 15 minutes and statistically speaking they’ll become has-beens before they know it and they might want to check the attitude and treat people well. The Killers hoped they wouldn’t be flashes in the pan—and look what happened.
After the interviews, I went to the show.
I’ll never forget the Scottish lass who got stuck next to me in the balcony at the show later that night. I was shouting, WHAT IS THIS SONG???
It was Mr. Brightside, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
I remember the stage and the lights as purple and blue. It was like they’d produced the perfect song just for me. I remember thinking how glad I was I hadn’t heard a single song of theirs before meeting them (generally you want to do all the research you can and get to know the subject’s work beforehand, but it didn’t work out that way on this occasion) because I was able to interview them without any preconceived notions or even a hint of fangirling.
If you have any questions, I’ll try to answer them. Not a ton of people in my life are dying to hear about The Killers, unfortunately, so I’m happy to talk a bit about what they were like back then (exhausted, for one thing).
I wrote all about that experience in my new memoir Let Me Tell You a Secret, but The Killers are only in two chapters. I’m happy to answer some questions here. I’d love to hear from anyone who was there that night, too…
(Pictured: the CD Brandon insisted on signing for me. It’s generally unprofessional for a journalist to ask so I had happy he offered).