Man and Boy, Jonathan Slatter is slaughtered by The Killers.
I can remember it clearly.
I was sitting in my Dad’s car, moaning at him to change the CD in a way that only an 11-year-old can do.
‘Dad this is rubbish. Your taste in music is so uncool,’ says the boy with an mp3 player full of Busted songs.
Thankfully Dad refused to change the track. Two minutes later I heard a certain ‘Mr. Brightside’ for the first time.
That was a full decade ago, but it’s a track that will never grow old. When the band encored with it at their recent gig at the Eventim Apollo, the song sounded as fresh as ever.
The Apollo gig coincided with the release of The Killers’ Direct Hits – a welcome reminder of how many stand-out tracks they have released since ‘Brightside’ first appeared on the shelves.
They started the set with a new song, ‘Shot At The Night’. By the time they got to old favourites ‘Somebody Told Me’ and ‘Spaceman’, sitting in your seats was a thing of the past.
Brandon Flowers then slowed it down with recent hit ‘The Way It Was’, stopping the vocals half way through to thank UK fans for adopting The Killers after their Las Vegas home town had all but ignored them:
‘You were the first ones to make us feel worth a damn – you gave us the confidence to go elsewhere.’
Sharing a tender moment with the crowd, The Killers asked us to ‘Smile Like You Mean It’, before going on to cover Joy Division’s ‘Shadowplay’.
Sounds like a cliché – it is a cliché – but I can’t help saying that the hits kept coming: ‘Human’, ‘When You Were Young’, ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ and ‘A Dustland Fairytale’, to name but a few.
Hearing all those hits it got me thinking back to 10 years ago when I begged my Dad to change the CD. Would I ever have bought tickets to this Killer gig if my Dad had given in to my moaning?