Las Vegas is a city where you can sail gondolas down Venetian canals, ride a rollercoaster through the New York skyline, or gawk at a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. It daily consumes more seafood than the rest of the US combined, despite sitting in the midst of an arid and unforgiving desert. Even its culture – from the Rat Pack to Elvis to EDM – has historically been imported from elsewhere, and usually at eye-watering expense. It’s something Brandon Flowers alludes to tonight, midway through The Killers’ two-hour ribbon-cutting ceremony at the brand new $375m, 20,000-seater T-Mobile Arena: “First I heard that Floyd Mayweather was going to open this place and then I heard the Dixie Chicks were gonna do it,” he says. “Now, I love boxing and I love country music, but something about that just didn’t sit right with me…”
Of course it didn’t, and it should come as no surprise that Las Vegas’ favourite (and proudly native) sons open the strip’s newest addition in considerable style, enlisting the help of Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds for ‘Jenny Was a Friend of Mine’, the percussive talents of the Blue Man Group on ‘Human’ and even septuagenarian crooner Wayne Newton – or ‘The Midnight Idol’ as he’s known in these parts – for a cover of ‘Johnny B. Goode’. During the grand finale of (what else?) ‘Viva Las Vegas’, they bring on jugglers and a troupe of showgirls; just when you think things couldn’t possibly get any more Vegas, you spot Carrot Top and Ron Jeremy watching from the wings. In every sense of the word – and by every measure of this city’s sky-high standard for entertainment – tonight is an extravaganza.
Yet while they might play up to the ersatz glitz and glamour of their hometown, The Killers’ music has always been about homespun myths and old-fashioned values – boy-meets-girl, two-star towns, wide-open expanses and the America that Republican politicians sometimes refer to as the ‘real’ one. ‘A Dustland Fairytale’, even documents the meeting of Flowers’ mother and father, unapologetically romanticised as Cinderella and her “slick chrome American prince.” Like many of his best songs, it’s a small, personal vignette bombastically tailored for an audience of tens of thousands, and it’s a big part of why, in a turn of events almost as improbable as the city they call home, The Killers have become better at being U2 than U2 currently are themselves.
After all the balloons have fallen from the rafters and the main show is at an end, the band speed across town to the Bunkhouse, a 250-capacity venue that’s more Old West saloon than bells-and-whistles enormodome, for a second, secret one. There, they pull out a handful of first-album cuts – ‘Midnight Show’, ‘On Top’, the Smiths-y ‘Change Your Mind’ – as well as the unjustly-maligned ‘Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll’ (delivered, we’d like to think, in the spirit of #indieamnesty) that serve to underline just how far they’ve come. The performance is loose, frenzied and thrilling, a callback to the days when The Killers were scrappy contenders with everything still to prove. The habitually self-critical Flowers would likely tell you that hasn’t changed, but tonight, it’s hard to see how they’re anything but triumphant. In the capital of second chances, The Killers have only ever needed one.
