Whether it was due to the Australian Open occupying Rod Laver Arena, or Big Day Out scaling back to ensure the maximum amount of punters at the Australia Day leg of the one-day festival, one of the world’s biggest rock exports found themselves playing the smaller Palace Theatre last Tuesday.
But The Killers made no concessions to their festival sized set, basting the walls with the sweat and energy of a baying, loving crowd.
Guitarist Dave Keuning foreshadowed the Las Vegans’ arrival in a recent interview, saying “most people want the hits and we’re not ship shy on giving it to ‘em.”
He wasn’t kidding.
As the band march briskly on stage, greeted by deafening roars and augmented by a second guitarist and keyboardist, they casually launch into ‘Mr Brightside’.
With the house lights full beam throughout, the thundering masses almost drown out the band, setting a bar that rarely dips from full-lunged fervour – from both band and audience – for the next 90 minutes.
That they open fire with a song typically reserved for encore status sets a statement of intent for the night.
Their host of equally arena-sized singles, ‘Smile Like You Mean It’, ‘Somebody Told Me’ and a monster rendition of ‘Spaceman’ follow in swift succession.
All still potent reminders that The Killers’ dramatic catalogue, engineered with surging four-four rhythms and choruses as big and iconic as the Grand Canyon, are ruthlessly designed to incite euphoric sing-alongs.
Even the newer material – the liturgy as spectacle ‘Miss Atomic Bomb’ and countrified ‘Here On Out’ – have the bleach blondes bobbing and stomping along, while tight-shirted men emphatically point their digits skyward with each everyman phrase and melody.
The master of ceremonies, delivering his broad tales of romantic vagrants and blue-collar heroes (quite literally on ‘Runaways’), is the ever-boyish Brandon Flowers.
Back to his clean-shaven ‘dapper dan’ mode, he sports a leather bomber jacket that later reveals a muscle top that would befit Gene Kelly, subtly imagining his own brand of musical theatre.
Flowers is the chirping, bouncing centrepiece of the show, his singing in top form, indulging in tried-and-true call and response antics. “You know the drill” is all he needs to trigger the desired effect during ‘For Reasons Unknown’, or luring the gathered into a chorus of Crowded House’s ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’.
Drummer Ronnie Vannucci is his only competition visually, hammering away like a champ from his very first crashing phrase (and looking eerily like Krist Novoselic’s imaginary brother). No mean feat considering that their set consciously avoids any lulls whatsoever.
A performance filled with quaking anthems and little room for ‘slow, quiet ones’ (‘Be Still’ being the only exception).
A constant high that many bands would fail to maintain, with or without the Killers’ familiar catalogue, based on an arena rock hybrid that bridges Born To Run mythmaking with the British New Wave the band are equally fond of.
Their ‘Bruce Synthsteen’ mandate rife on ‘Read My Mind’, and its narrative of “breakin’ out of this two-star town” against sawing keys and soaring melodies. Or the sentimentality of ‘A Dustland Fairytale’. Name checking white trash, a ‘slick chrome American prince’, ‘Blue Jean’, ‘Moon River’, Cinderella, and a boxing devil before it’s even hit its refrain.
The older material still sounds sharp too. Despite a wonky intro of bass pops and slaps, ‘Somebody Told Me’ is still ever the scorching electro rocker, ‘Under The Gun’ provides a rare but welcome showing. Later, the focus on Mark Stoermer’s guttural, disco bass line lends “Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine’ serious punch.
There’s plenty of visual spectacles to gorge on too, as smokey blue lasers mesh across the ceiling during ‘Human’, before the thatching breaks into needling lines of red for its (still) baffling chorus.
But as a thousand voices sing those truncated words in unison, it’s clear that The Killers’ unashamed love for cliché is their strength, not their weakness.
Earnest nostalgia wrapped in preening guitar rock, such as the concert closing ‘When We Were Young’, is The Killers stock in trade, and currently, stock is very high indeed, and trade is booming.
