Brandon Flowers of The Killers has revealed a few of his favourite artists, or “kings” as likes to refer to them.
“Brandon has many kings,” Killers drummer, Ronnie Vannucci told NME right before their Glastonbury Pyramid Stage headline set.
“Yeah, I have about fifteen kings. Liam [Gallagher] is one of them.”
Listing other stars he admires, Brandon went on to namecheck “Don Henley, Peter Gabriel, Morrissey would be a king, Bono would be a king, Springsteen would be a king.”
Asking about Morrissey‘s problematic politics, Flowers replied: “He’s still a king. He’s unparalleled in what he’s achieved and his prowess and his lyrics and his sense of melody, it’s just incredible. I forgot he was in hot water though, so I shouldn’t have brought him up.”
Later that night, in celebration of The Smiths, The Killers asked Johnny Marr to join them on stage to play the classic, ‘This Charming Man’. Marr also stayed to play guitar on closing Killers track, ‘Mr Brightside’.
The band also shared some further details on their new record, which they’d previously hinted might be a concept album.
“With any album, it’s hard for there to not be conceptual threads so even on the last album it was definitely there,” Flowers explained.
“On all the records, there’s been an element of that – ‘Day and Age’ is full of it, but I don’t think people picked up on it. ‘Sam’s Town’ was a really fully realised version of that. We haven’t committed to creating a concept album but all our albums have elements of a concept album, we just haven’t done the whole thing and made a tour out of it.”
Ronnie Vannucci added: “There are close to thirty almost-finished songs so we’re going to go back and re-record them and find the line, find the symmetry and there, we’ll find the concept.”
The band also confirmed the new record would be released in 2020.