Roll up, roll up and welcome, in this so-called summer, to the era of music’s circus maximus. Taylor Swift, Foo Fighters and Bruce Springsteen are abroad in the land, playing three-hour-plus outdoor sets in UK stadia. For America’s guitar-wielding super-elite in 2024, more is more, come rain or shine or more rain.
It’s refreshing, then, that for their Rebel Diamonds tour – named after last year’s Greatest Hits and celebrating 20 years since the release of debut album Hot Fuss – The Killers are “retreating” indoors. After hitting the UK’s windiest football parks for 2022’s previous tour on this side of the Atlantic, they’re playing arenas here and in Ireland. That’s 16 times, mind, with the UK leg kicking off with four nights here at Manchester’s new, 23,000-capacity giant grey box.
Still, it’s ironic as well as surprising that The Killers are (relatively) scaling back. The Las Vegas band, led by fame-craving Brandon Flowers, have always been big-is-best kinda guys, their eyes long on the glittery prize, their choruses as sky-high and mile-wide as their ambition.
But here they are, in venues with roofs and keeping their 21-song set on the right side of two hours. Not that anything feels pinched. In Manchester, on a jutting, pointed stage, rimmed by glowing jewels and crowned by “Rebel Diamonds” picked out in retro Vegas neon font, the band were in roaring form from the off. The Springsteen-goes-New Wave “Read My Mind” was an early showcase for Dave Keuning, the big-haired, bare-chested axeman back onstage after a lengthy sabbatical and busting exultant moves on his trapezoidal guitar.
He was more than matched in the Rock Star shape-throwing by an ageless 42-year-old Flowers, resplendent in shiny suit and shinier teeth. On a pummelling “Somebody Told Me”, the first of multiple huge singalongs, Flowers posed like a boxing champ. The opening one-two-three punch was completed by the pacey but slight synth bop of “Spaceman”, before the frontman revisited the casino bell-hop he once was: “My name is Brandon Flowers and I’ll be your host this evening… Find everything you needed?”
First-album bangers “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” and “Smile Like You Mean It” were bracing reminders of The Killers’ OG USP as New Order with a desert suntan. But it was the arms-aloft, wide-scale heartland Americana of “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “When You Were Young” that really ignited the vast standing area in Europe’s biggest indoor venue.
Come the encore, underwhelming 2022 single “Boy” – think: Pet Shop Toddlers – was trotted out. But it did what it came to do, teeing up a carousing cover of “A Little Respect”, a smart bit of set-listing owning the fact that “Boy” owes its synth refrain to Erasure’s deathless 1988 smash.
And then finally, of course, was the song recently anointed the UK’s biggest ever song never to top the charts, the 21-year-old “Mr. Brightside”. Cue the oblivious abandon of an arena-scale wedding disco. As Flowers had said earlier in the set: “We are The Killers, and we’re in the service industry.” In Manchester, that service was nigh impeccable.