Music review: The Killers, Bellahouston Park

BRANDON Flowers had evidently done his homework before The Killers’ massive Glasgow Summer Sessions outdoor show at Bellahouston Park this week.

Brandon Flowers fronted some infectious, fistpumping rock. Picture: Wattie Cheung

The Killers

BELLAHOUSTON PARK, GLASGOW

***

The Las Vegas rock band’s sparkly pink-jacketed frontman congratulated Scotland on “over 50 medals at the Commonwealth Games,” before remarking on how unusually dry the weather was. Later he sang a cover of local heroes Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), accompanied by guitarist Dave Keuning, inspiring a mass roar-along.

Flowers looked less enamoured with Glasgow, however, when he was forced to halt the show during the encore as a fight broke out in the crowd. “We came here to celebrate,” he pleaded, before growing increasingly exasperated as stewards took their time to remove the aggressor. “Don’t people handle these situations?” he complained, presumably to organisers’ groans.

It was the only stumbling block in an otherwise pacey and solidly entertaining – if never quite exceptional – show, one that had the feeling about it of a band in a bit of an in-between phase.

Just over a decade on from their debut album Hot Fuss, last year’s contract-fulfilling and thus inevitably premature best-of collection Direct Hits remains the group’s latest full release, and there appears to be no new material on the horizon. We got only one recent-ish number, 2013 single Shot At The Night, among a set built around those greatest hits. They included glammy disco opener Somebody Told Me, and the infectious new-wavey dance pop of Human, featuring the famously nonsensical lyric “are we human or are we dancer?”

Flowers specialises in confusing lyrical non-sequiturs. “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier,” from All These Things That I’ve Done, was another refrain bellowed back at him en masse by the crowd, despite it containing no obvious meaning nor poetry. But shallow or not, The Killers do invigoratingly bombastic rock like few others can, as well proven by a fist-pumping final flourish of When You Were Young and Mr Brightside.

MALCOLM JACK
Seen on 19.08.14