Brandon Flowers’ teenage obsessions: ‘I considered an Oasis tattoo’
I grew up in Henderson, just outside Las Vegas. When I was eight, we moved to Nephi, this rural town in Utah. So at the same time I was falling in love with music, I was also being introduced to rodeos and farming. I didn’t realise the impact, but now if I hear the right song, I’m instantly transported back to the clouds, woods and mountains of the American west.
The isolation of the recent lockdown stirred up a lot of emotion about that time of my life, so the new Killers album is based on my teenage years in Nephi. It was a shock moving from what felt like a big city to a very small town. I felt like an outsider, a misfit. I remember thinking it was like living in the town from Stand By Me.
Apart from the cars, it still looked like something from the 50s. My dad only drove old cars and listened to oldies, so I fed into that, too. When I learned to drive, I was always driving 1952 trucks or 58 Chevys with the station set to the oldies, just like my dad.
Cheers
It is one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. I loved Woody Harrelson and Ted Danson. I was 12, 13, so some of the jokes might have gone over my head, but I learned a lot about life just from watching Cheers.
The beautiful thing was that it was something that I did with my dad. He worked at Smith’s supermarket in a white, button-up, short-sleeve shirt. He would come home and lay on the floor with his hands propping his head up to watch TV, and I would lay on or beside him. He had a particular smell, and whiskers, which seemed strange to a child. I remember touching his face and feeling the sandpaper on his jaw.
The cool thing is that Taxi in the 70s and Cheers in the 80s were written by Glen and Les Charles, who went to the same high school as my parents in Henderson, Nevada. It was cool that these guys who grew up in the same dirt as I had went on to become wildly successful sitcom writers.
Queen Bitch by David Bowie
I only discovered David Bowie at the end of my teenage years. I hadn’t realised that every band I had grown up listening to – New Order, the Smiths, Duran Duran, the Cure – all tied back to Bowie. The Bowie album that hooked me was Hunky Dory. I started to see the lineage and its importance.
I moved back to Vegas to try to form a band and was about to meet our guitarist, Dave Keuning, so it was a perfect time to be inspired. I was a food runner at Josef’s Brasserie on Las Vegas Strip, and would answer classified ads looking for singers or keyboard players, but didn’t really hit it off with anybody.
Looking back, knocking on all those strange doors was pretty dangerous. It was a relief to meet Dave. We bonded over similar influences and got something going right away. If you listen to Mr Brightside – even now – it’s such a direct descendant of Queen Bitch from Hunky Dory, I’m surprised we weren’t called out immediately.
Oasis
Man, I was pumped about Oasis as a teenager. I was definitely Oasis over Blur. Liam is the ultimate frontman and Noel such a great songwriter, and they just captured Britain. Even being so far away, they were appealing. I even batted around the idea of getting an Oasis tattoo.
I was hell-bent on having a synth pop band. Then I saw Oasis play at the
Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas in 2001. Listening to the crowd during Don’t Look Back in Anger, I realised I wanted guitars as well.
We’re one of the lucky bands not to have been completely dismissed by Noel or Liam. I’ll never forget one of our first trips to the UK, playing the NME awards. Noel came backstage and said he’d worked out how to play All These Things That I’ve Done. It was so surreal, because less than a year before, I was sitting on my bed with a guitar, without a record deal, trying to work out Oasis tracks.
Virgin Megastore
There used to be a shop called the Underground in Las Vegas. My older brother Shane would come home with subway-sized posters of the Cure and Tears For Fears, and NME and Q Magazine.
When the Underground closed, the only place I could get my hands on British stuff was Virgin Megastore in Caesars Palace. I would sit in the magazine aisle for hours, just to see what was happening. You could read about something then go downstairs and actually buy it from the import section.
That’s how I found out about the Strokes. Their first release, The Modern Age EP, was a pretty big moment in my life, because I realised that I wasn’t good enough. If I was going to compete, I had to get better. Yellow by Coldplay had come out and we’d heard some of the White Stripes, but the Strokes were so good. It was depressing, but it lit a fire in me that really helped propel our band, and we threw away all the songs we’d written up to that point, apart from Mr Brightside.
The Goonies
We’re on a bit of a Corey Feldman phase at the moment, and so we showed our kids Stand By Me and The Goonies. It’s funny, kids aren’t affected by The Goonies the way we were, and I can’t quite wrap my head around why. I suppose Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Stranger Things are so good, it’s tough for them to understand why we loved Goonies so much.
Goonies still has such a hold over me. I think it goes back to why I was sort of in love with the idea of England. It’s the overcast skies. Goonies was filmed in Oregon in the Pacific Northwest. Eighty per cent of the movie is grey clouds. It was so different to Henderson, Nevada, where it’s 345 days of sun a year.
I loved that anything is possible for these kids on their bikes. It’s got all the ingredients: adventure, treasure, crime. And the music – oh my gosh. I loved The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough by Cyndi Lauper. Plus Josh Brolin’s character is called Brandon, so obviously I gravitated towards him.
The Killers’ new album Pressure Machine is out now
from Syria, and it took her three years to reach Sweden.” As the security situation in Syria deteriorated, the couple, who have two small children, changed their plans: “We realised that it was just too dangerous to bring anybody else in, so I decided that I was going to do everything, all the logistics, myself.”
Hirori has deep roots in this part of the world. Yet even he was unaware of the extent of what these kidnapped women – known as “sabaya” – had been through. “It was sort of a taboo to talk about,” he says. He has since come to understand the heavy significance of the term: “It’s been around since ancient times … [It] encompasses [the idea] that you have the right to take these girls in times of war and use them as you please: they clean your house, you can have sex with them.” The victims, too, are brainwashed into this way of thinking, as Hirori explains: “Almost all the young women I met were kidnapped at a very, very young age. They’ve told me: ‘But don’t you understand? We were traitors in our religion. We didn’t follow Islam, and this is God’s punishment; this is what we were destined to do.’ So that’s why it takes such a long time for them to get out of that mental state, and this hell that they’ve been living in.”
The plight of the Yazidis – recognised as a genocide by several international bodies – was widely reported on in 2014, but, seven years on, thousands of girls and women remain missing, abandoned by the rest of the world. This rescue mission has fallen to the Yazidi Home Center (YHC), a tiny volunteer organisation based in Syria and represented in Hirori’s film by Mahmud, a tall, stoic presence, who is constantly struggling for reception on his mobile phone, or in hushed conference with his colleague Ziyad. As Hirori is careful to point out, Mahmud and Ziyad are not the only ones engaged in this urgent work. Indeed, it is the women who go undercover to infiltrate the al-Hawl camp – many survivors of trafficking themselves – who take on the greatest risk. For safety reasons, Hirori says, their names and images could not be included in the film. “We decided only to make a portrait of Mahmud and Ziyad. But it’s important for me not to raise anybody up as a hero. I just wanted to document exactly what was going on in their everyday lives.”
Even so, the YHC had serious reservations about allowing Hirori to film at all. “They told me afterwards that, in the beginning, they were trying to find some kind of white lie, to derail me from doing this documentary. But we established a very good relationship after a while. We had to trust each other in the dangerous situations that we were put in.”
That danger is abundantly obvious in the film: car chases, shootouts and tense interrogations. It’s the kind of excitement usually seen in Hollywood action films, with one important distinction: everyone remains oddly calm. “I showed a clip to my producer [Antonio Russo Merenda] of a shooting going on, and I had to explain to him why nobody was panicking, like they do in the movies.” Even the horrors of war can become normalised with repetition: “Somebody is getting shot, somebody is getting stabbed, these noises are everywhere and you just don’t become surprised any more. You try to subdue your inner fear, to keep a collective calm, to get through a situation.”
Sadly, in al-Hawl, smuggled guns are a much more common sight than smuggled cameras; this presented Hirori with a practical challenge: “Every time I tried to film in the central square, everybody just gathered around me.” He experimented with using his iPhone instead, holding it to his ear and pretending to talk into it. “But those images didn’t really turn out well.” Another idea, to strap a hidden camera to his body and enter the camp alone, was vetoed outright by the YHC as too dangerous. In the end, Hirori disguised the camera and himself in a niqab (the full-length black veil worn by almost all women in al-Hawl), and entered the camp among the female infiltrators. This produced the distinctive hidden-camera footage that bookends the film, though it’s not as innovative a solution as you might have assumed: “It turns out that a man who had stabbed a member of the security police was wearing a niqab,” says Hirori. “Men very often use the niqab to disguise themselves and enter the square, mainly to gather information and just check things out.”
Sabaya isn’t all such high drama. After rescue, the women are usually taken to Mahmud’s home to begin the long process of recovery, while the YHC works to find more permanent accommodation. It’s here that we meet Mahmud’s sweet and cheeky young son Shadi, and his mother, a welcoming woman who takes great delight in setting discarded niqabs alight as Shadi pokes the pyre with a stick. (“May God eliminate these clothes!”) These are moments of light relief for the audience, but that’s not the main reason for their inclusion, says Hirori. “That part is very important in the recovery of the girls; going back to normality and normal family life. I also wanted to show the humanity and kindness of Mahmud’s family there. They’re not rich people – they’re very poor – but they do share anything that they have with all these women who come to live with them, and anybody else.”
Hirori himself also often stayed at Mahmud’s home during filming. “I could wake up in the morning and do some cleaning in the house, maybe cook the meal. I spent time playing with the children, talking to anybody.” Slowly, some of the women felt comfortable enough to discuss their traumatic experiences on camera, and these were two-way conversations. “Before I started making these documentaries, I didn’t talk to anyone about my experiences as a refugee, I was very much closed about it,” says Hirori. “It’s just history repeating itself, over and over again. My dad experienced the same thing, and my grandfather experienced the same thing.”
With the release of Sabaya, the third in this unofficial trilogy, does Hirori now feel these women’s story – and his – have been fully told? “After each and every one of my films, I’ve thought: ‘OK, this was the last, and now I just want to focus on being with my family and living my life in Sweden.’ Then something happens, and I feel I have to go back again.” He gives a rueful smile. “So, here I am, again, saying that this is the last film and now I’m going to focus on my normal life.”
But, I reply, you slept with Roman Polanski when you were 15 and he’s now infamous as a sexual predator. “I found him sweet,” she avers. “I always liked Poles.”
What did you see in Allen Klein, the ruthless manager of the Stones and Beatles in the late 60s? “Oh, that was probably a moment of madness,” says Gillespie. “But he did have a sexy brain.”
Dylan was “smart and funny – really interesting to be around. I don’t often find Americans attractive, but he certainly was.” Page was “a gentleman at all times. He produced and played guitar on my 1968 single You Just Gotta Know My Mind and, as we shared an interest in Indian music, we went to see Ustad Vilayat Khan and Ravi Shankar in concert.” She barely registers Jagger as a lover “because Mick slept with everyone”, while Keith Moon, equally unsurprisingly, “consumed a lot of speed – which kept him up all night! He was the nicest sort of lunatic.” Hers, it seems, was a truly swinging 60s, where high times, great music and good sex flowed through almost every experience.
Her observations of Bowie are the most interesting. Reflecting on their first encounter, she admits that he was probably interested in finding a bed for the night because he didn’t want to have to hike back to Kent. He did come to like Gillespie a lot and once took her home to Bromley where his chilly parents fed them tuna sandwiches and Bowie expressed how much he hated the life they lived. “David was ferociously ambitious,” she says, “and I could see why – stuck in Kent in this awful home. It was the opposite of my parents and my life.” Once Bowie met Angela Barnett – soon to be Angie Bowie – he called Gillespie, suggesting: “I just met a woman I think you will get on with.” And so she did, with Bowie overseeing a menage à trois for several years.
When Bowie split from Angie and relocated from London to the US he also abruptly ended all contact with Gillespie. “I got a call that went: ‘You’re still friends with Angie? Bye bye.’ And that was it, I never heard from him again. Obviously, it hurt a bit but I felt more sorry for the likes of Ronno [Mick Ronson] who were devastated when Bowie dispensed with them.” She shrugs, and adds: “David could be ruthless in the way he treated people. But to me, he was always the same David Jones I first got to know, and I remember him very fondly.”
Alongside all the glamorous sex, Gillespie’s autobiography details regular instances of harassment from the age of 11, with men exposing themselves, groping and, on occasion, trying to force themselves upon her (the latter allegedly included Ahmet Ertegun, late founder of Atlantic Records). Yet she remains nonplussed about these incidents. “I wasn’t going to let it affect me. It was a bit of a nuisance but I got on with life. I have no hangups – we were pioneers, we had fun. Today everyone is so uptight and hung up on that woke bollocks. I’m so pleased I’m not young.”
Ageing is reflected in Gillespie’s songs – Funk Me, It’s Hot! is probably the only blues concerning menopause – and becoming a follower of the late Indian spiritual leader Sai Baba ensures spiritual rather than corporeal matters now primarily concern her. This has led Gillespie to record albums of Indian devotional music. Whether singing to a million Baba devotees in India or fellow travellers in countries such as Dagestan and Kyrgyzstan, Gillespie loves to sing devotionals. “I grew as a singer and a person,” she says of discovering her guru.
Back in the material world, Gillespie co-founded a blues festival on the island of Mustique which saw her mixing showbiz and aristocrat friends. Here she introduced the gangster/actor John Bindon to Princess Margaret (“rubbish” is her response to rumours of a supposed affair between the royal and the rogue). Life may be quieter today but many of her former paramours remain affectionate: Dylan invited Dana to tour as his UK support in 1997 and Jimmy Page turned up at her front door with a pair of tickets for Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion concert.
Retirement is not being considered. “I’m extremely busy,” she says, mentioning her YouTube channel, Globetrotting With Gillespie, and a forthcoming Vietnamese tour. “A chap from Universal was just around as they are gathering my first two albums and all the songs I demoed for Immediate Records into a box set. A new hip, and then I’ll get on with life.”
• Deep Pockets is released on 13 August on Ace Records
David could be ruthless in the way he treated people, but I remember him very fondly
Guillermo Cabrera Infante) about five people searching for love under the hot Madrid sun. A stray bullet during a bungled hostage situation links the destinies of an Italian junkie and a pair of mismatched cops, one played by Javier Bardem. It’s unfailingly warmhearted and generous, even towards perpetrators of sins as heinous as stalking and wife-beating.
2. Julieta (2016)
Three stories by Alice Munro form the basis of this tale about the relationship between a mother and her estranged daughter, with memories, past and present intertwined. It’s a meandering but thrilling ride, nudged along by some inspired film-making sleights of hand and confident, engaging storytelling of the highest order, with a Klimt-pattern dressing-gown as vital to the mise en scène as the spectacular Galician landscapes.
1. Pain and Glory (2019)
Most of Almodóvar’s films incorporate details of his own life and career; this is more autobiographical than most, but miraculously avoids selfindulgence. Banderas (whose performance won a slew of awards, including best actor at Cannes) plays an ageing film director with debilitating health problems and a creative block. An encounter with an old friend triggers a collage of memories: childhood, erotic awakening, 80s Madrid, drugs. It’s a masterclass in seamless non-linear film-making from a director who has come a long, long way from Fuck … Fuck … Fuck Me Tim!.