How would Brandon Flowers rank some of The Killers’ most iconic songs? The answer may surprise you – check out the frontman’s Blind Ranking video for NME below ahead of his upcoming solo UK and Ireland tour.
NME caught up with Flowers earlier this year to discuss his latest solo album ‘Thrasher’, which released in August. During our time with the vocalist, we got him to rank five songs from The Killers’ discography in order of greatness, without knowing what track could come up next.
The first track up was 2006’s ‘When You Were Young’, which Flowers said the band are “grateful for, still” after feeling worried that their second album wouldn’t live up to the success of their debut ‘Hot Fuss’. “The way the room looked and the way it felt when ‘When You Were Young’ started to sizzle, I think we knew we were going to be OK,” he said. We then asked Flowers how’d he rate the track ‘Human’, a song he worked on in London, while touring for ‘Sam’s Town’.
‘The Man’, off 2017’s ‘Wonderful Wonderful’, was presented to him next, which he said “sort of saved ‘Wonderful Wonderful’”, but would not be number one on his list. Flowers ranked the ‘Sam’s Town’ classic ‘Read My Mind’ high, but admitted “secretly, in my heart think ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ might be better sometimes.” He closed out his blind-ranking by giving us his verdict on arguably the band’s biggest song, ‘Mr. Brightside’.
“It’s a song that is very much associated with the band, you may have heard of it,” he quipped. He then broke down how the song came to be, saying it was written in response to Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’: “I had seen Oasis a few months before I met Dave Keuning, and I was blown away by the reception that it got at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. There was something different, and I was like, ‘I want that’.”
Watch the video below to see how Flowers blind-ranked those songs – and let us know how you’d rank them in our Instagram comments:
Brandon Flowers will kick off a solo tour across the UK and Ireland this week (October 14) at the O2 Academy in Bournemouth. From there, he’ll perform at London’s Royal Albert Hall before making his way to Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and more, concluding with a show at the Olympia in Dublin on October 27.
Flowers’ ‘Thrasher’ scored a four-star review from NME, with news editor Andrew Trendell writing: “After the gentle radio rock of his debut solo album ‘Flamingo’ to the assured electro-pop of follow-up ‘The Desired Effect’, ‘Thrasher’ is another signpost of how far Flowers has come as a writer away from the glitz and arena pomp of The Killers.”
