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A typical night in Las Vegas' Gold Coast casino and hotel. Amid the echoing chorus of slot machines and roulette wheels nobody notices the scantily clad young hooker running for her life, nor her breathless male pursuer still buckling up his trousers and tripping over unlaced shoes. Only when he catches her do players turn their heads, drawn by the blood curdling yelps as she repeatedly jams him in the face with one of her high heels. It was, as a young bellhop eyewitness by the name of Brandon Flowers recalls, like something out of a movie. That same night Flowers was called to a hospital where his mother had been rushed with a heart complaint. Sat opposite him in the emergency room was the poor stiletto-bruised dupe, grimly inhaling through a breathing apparatus. "I mean, what are the odds of that?" he smiles. "The hooker took his wallet and tried to ditch him. He obviously had health problems. But that's..." he shakes his head, smirking. "That's Las Vegas."
As Flowers is keen to emphasize, Sin City is deservedly nicknamed. It's July 2010 and we're driving down Las Vegas Boulevard in the singer's silver Audi sports car. He's pointing out his hometown's less salubrious landmarks. "These are a bit seedy," he sniggers as we cruise past a string of Bates-esque motels. "The kind of place where you can rent a room for half an hour."
The Vegas skyline, Flowers explains, has changed dramatically since his youth, but not the brazen promotion of human vice. "It used to be more about families," he sighs ruefully. "Now it's just...sex! There's trucks driving up and down the strip carrying billboards with a number to call and have women come to your room. That always existed. But now their asses are in your face."
It's this wicked underbelly to Vegas' dreamland glitz that Flowers scratches as never before on Flamingo, his debut solo offering recorded on hiatus from The Killers. While local pride has always played its part in his group's ethos - naming 2006 second album Sam's Town after the casino near his Aunt Joyce's house - on Flamingo (also titled after a local thoroughfare) Flowers all but nails himself in the heart of the city, an indie pop martyr symbolically purging its sins upon a neon cross: "Catalogs of concubines!" "Dreamers! Harlots!" "Cocaine and lady luck!" Is it really that bad?
"Well, you know the slogan for the town is, What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," says Flowers. "My favorite sign is one bought by a Christian-affiliated group. It says, "God knows what happens in Vegas. Heh! Heh! I love that!"
That he should be so in love with the city that much of his soul finds morally gruesome is one of many paradoxes in the life of flowers. On the one hand he's an international pop star having sold more than nine million albums in the UK alone, a preening, mascara-wearing indie heartthrob once voted Most Stylish Man by a leading men's magazine who is capable of coaxing Hollywood bombshell Charlize Theron into a video for debut solo single Crossfire. On the other, he's an international pop star who prefers Las Vegas to LA or New York ("We have the best sunsets I've ever seen," he swears), who no longer drinks or smokes and still has never been less than resolutely proud of his Mormon faith. He still goes to church, reads his Bible and prays on a daily basis, an intensely personal ritual he's now made public with Flamingo's On The Floor. The song of a man on his knees "begging please", it's the kind of gut-wrenching gospel you'd imagine purring from the lips of a 71-year-old Johnny Cash moments before he croaked his last: Flowers himself has only just turned 29.
"Religion seems to be dying in society in general," he frets, "which saddens me as it's something that's always been in my life and I'm thankful for it. I can't help but feel it's directly tied to the kind of people that we are."
Flowers first meets Q in a favorite haunt, the storage lot of the Neon Boneyard Museum of classic Vegas signage previously seen in the video for The Killers All These Things That I've Done. Cinematically suave and preposterously lean, he resembles a young Clark Gable on the madal bal tree syrup diet. There's something equally "old Hollywood" about his manner: the courteous All-American boy who seldom curses, answering questions with an earnest gaze and the faintest trace of a Jimmy Stewart stammer.
He's joined by older brother Shane, 41, proof enough that good bone structure and healthy physique abide in the Flowers gene pool. The family surname, Shane explains, is of Scottish origin ("Yep, as in Flowers of Scotland"). Shane says he's a ringer for their father, Terry, whereas he thinks Brandon owes more to their mother, Jean. As evidence he brings up a '60s black and white photo of Mr. and Mrs. Flowers on his iPhone. A handsome young couple, it could easily be the portrait of a country singing duo. Poignantly, the photo Shane shows Q is actually a detail from Jean Flowers' elegant headstone: after being diagnosed with brain cancer, their mother passed away in February this year, aged 64.
The brothers wander through the neon junkyard, each rustling bulb-encrusted sign jogging a vivid childhood memory. "I remember going to this casino with mom in our truck," Brandon says, "Going up and down every aisle in the parking lot. It wasn't till I was older I realized we were looking for my dad." The brothers share a bittersweet laugh. "Heh! To see if he'd come home."
Like his own father before him, Terry Flowers was a heavy drinker and a gambler whose problems threatened to tear the family apart. Brandon was five when he quit drinking; young enough to be spared the worst, but old enough to be aware of the effects of alcohol abuse on family life. Brandon's experiences as a child combined with the shadow of hereditary alcoholism is enough of a deterrent to govern his life today. Now married with two sons of his own, he follows his father's preventative measure of banning booze from the house. "I've stopped drinking and smoking completely because I don't want my children to ever see it," he admits. "But I understand why my father did what he did. That's the other side of Vegas. It's literally addictive."
You fear the family demon within?
"Oh yeah. I have an understanding of where my life could have ended up, the choices I could have made. It's a crazy town and it's something I have to live with everyday being here. I like roulette and blackjack, I've bet on big sports. It's a rush. But that feeling when you're losing money, your body knows you did something wrong. When you lose you feel...dirty."
On Flamingo you sing a lot about redemption. What have you to redeem?
"No comment!" he teases. "Thing is I understand why it happens and that's why it makes its way into the songs. But I'm lucky enough to have had very strong foundations with my religion from early on. A lot of people can't understand that, especially being Mormon. But I'm thankful for it."
There's another song about a 60 mile Mexican pilgrimage, from Nogales to Magdalena. You intend walking it?
"I really do. I mean it's a Catholic ritual but, y'know." A comically coy glance. "Do you think they'd be that opposed to me giving it a shot?"
Flowers may be a peculiar pop star but, with hindsight, he insists he was born to be one: "Looking back, I understood pop music when I was four. I realize that now." His earliest singing memory is in his sister's friend's house as a toddler eagerly warbling Sunglasses At Night, a 1984 hit by Corey Hart. "An awful '80s song," he shudders, "But I could follow melodies and knew how they worked even then."
Age 8, his family relocated from Vegas to Nephi, Utah, the archetypal backwater American town, population 3,000. Youth entertainment consisted of sitting in a circle of trucks watching other kids wrestle in the dust. "A total culture shock," he remembers. "The exact opposite of Vegas. I mean I wasn't necessarily a city kid, but I know I wasn't like them." Marooned in Utah, the occasional oldies FM blast of Elvis in his dad's truck reminded Flowers of the promised land they left behind, a homesickness that intensified with the purchase of Frank Sinatra's 1974 live album The Main Event. "It's Sinatra recorded in New York singing about Chicago," says Flowers. "But something about that sound made me want to be back here in Vegas."
While Elvis and Sinatra stirred the showman in his blood, his pop education came via anglophile brother Shane, a fan of The Cure and The Smiths. "One of the weird things was that I was listening to the same music as my brother did 12 years before me. Shane was long gone out of the house but I'm listening to his music and my parents already know it. That's the last thing anybody wants when you're that age. I had a chance to be a real outsider and my mom's whistling Girlfriend In A Coma while doing the dishes."
Brandon hadn't long turned 16 when Shane took him to his first concert - Morrissey at Salt Lake City on Halloween, 1997. He since cited it as "the most thrilling night" of his life. "I'm taking my kid brother to a concert, hoping he's going to be okay," recalls Shane. "But the moment Morrissey came on Brandon was off, down the front, going wild. I'd never seen him like that before."
That year Flowers' parents allowed him to leave home for that of his Aunt Joyce back in Vegas where Shane's musical influence would be matched by the one person Brandon still believes "shaped my life and made music possible". Fellow Smiths apostle Trevor Gagner was a film student who shared Flowers' love of all things British and indie enough to tempt fate by suggesting they start a band. "Which was ludicrous to me," laughs Flowers. "It seemed so far-fetched. But we did. We weren't great, we were just learning. But Trevor made it happen. He was my best friend."
What happened to Trevor?
"He's in Washington, DC. He won't talk to me," he sighs. "You'd think it would be the other way around. The quintessential asshole guy who gets big and then doesn't talk to his old friends, right? He's upset about something, maybe things I've said about our first band [Blush Response] and the music we were making. But none of us were great back then. I definitely wasn't. I love Trevor. It's upsetting to me that now I can't talk to him."
Q asks Flowers who his best friend is today. He lists family members, cousins and nephews. I ask again, outside of family. "There's a couple of guys from church who I'll golf with now and again. But I guess I don't really..." He frowns, then a self-amused giggle. "Geez! I guess I don't have a best friend!"
It's Tuesday night in Caesar's palace. Flowers weaves Q through plodding crowds much too preoccupied by one-armed bandits, crap tables and the souvenir shops of its entertainers-in-residence Cher and ex-Bros man Matt Goss to notice the real life pop star within breathing distance. We pass Spago, the Italian restaurant where 11 years ago Flowers waited tables and the scene of a near-Biblical encounter with his Mancunian idol. One afternoon in October 1999, Morrissey popped in for a mushroom pizza and a pot of Earl Grey. Flowers took home the ex-Smith's soiled tea mug, a grail so holy that, as he awkwardly confesses, he still keeps it in his safe.
Such is the behavior of a true pop believer; a man whose mother-in-law used to be a Madonna impersonator, who rightly thinks "nobody" will ever out-hunk Elvis in his '68 Comeback Special, and who for several years now has been saving his beard clippings in a polythene zip bag with the aim of one day presenting it to former hero/now friend Neil Tennant (a ceremonial riposte to the Pet Shop Boy's concern Flowers' episodes of facial hairiness were "not pop"). The bag is almost full. I asked if he keeps that in his safe as well. "Nooo!" He snorts at so seemingly absurd and assumption. "In my toiletries bag."
We choose another Caesar's Italian eatery where any speculation that Flowers may be starving himself gorgeous is quashed by his hearty consumption of caprese salad, pasta and half a housebrick-sized steak washed down with several glasses of cola. In truth he owes his slender 145 lb frame to a 2-hour workout with a personal trainer every other day. "For my height maybe I don't weigh enough, but," he pats his tight gut, eyes twinkling, "I have a duty."
Are you now enjoying being a pop star?
"I am. When The Killers started I was very aware that I wasn't ready and it was scary. I was on these famous stages I'd read about as a kid and I started to feel I was getting too big for my britches. It made me want to learn to try and be better. Now it's starting to feel like we belong."
Not for the first time today, Flowers answers a question about himself using the collective "we" of The Killers. Force of habit, possibly, it says much for the genuine devotion he maintains for his band who on 4 July 2010 played for President Obama at the White House as part of the Salute To The Military concert in honor of US servicemen. "A fantastic experience," he moons. Flamingo only happened, Flowers asserts, because the other members wanted an indefinite time off just as he was experiencing "an explosion of creativity" he couldn't ignore. As it is, drummer Ronnie Vannucci guests on the track Playing With Fire while Flowers has "saved an ace" from the Flamingo sessions for the next Killers record due, he hopes, around 2012. Ask him whom he feels closest to out of the respective former charges of Flamingo co-producers Daniel Lanois and Stuart Price - Bob Dylan or Kylie Minogue? - and he answers "somewhere in between," adding in less than a beat, "and so are The Killers." His group pride even extends to wearing Killers t-shirts went out and about. "And still I don't get recognized!"
The last lines on Flamingo are Swallow It's, "Just take your time/But not too much time." You're not yet 30 but you feel life ticking away?
"I do. It's starting to scare me. Time seems to go faster now than it ever has; I realize I'm not getting it back. I'm starting to take notice of an hour whereas before I never did. I have a real fear of missing out on things with my family."
Flowers, his wife Tana and their boys, Ammon and Gunner, live in Henderson, once a separate city now swallowed up by Vegas' metropolitan sprawl. Bar a designated piano room there's little to distinguish it as a pop star's nest - not a multiplatinum album plaque in sight. A typical day away from pop's coalface sees him wake early with a raging hunger. "I have to eat, like right away." If Tana wants a nap, he'll take both children to a bagel shop. "It's amazing the attention you get from women," he says innocently, the fact he's received at least one "Year's Sexiest Man" award temporarily deserting his mind. "If you are a guy it's weird how much credit you get carrying a kid around. When I have both they act like a dream's just walked through the door."
Do the Flowers men age well?
"My dad's a kind of classic old handsome dude. I hope I'm headed there. I seem to be," he coughs. "I'm certainly not afraid of the grays. You're never going to see me dyeing the grays. I already have quite a few."
Do you shave, trim or pluck elsewhere?
"Not for a while," he ponders, stroking an eyebrow as if giving the subject much too serious consideration. "But I've never been a plucker."
As we stroll back to Flowers' car, Caesar's casino floors are in full swing to Lady Luck's taunting tune. Somewhere not very far away there's a fair chance of mortgage-sized hopes glugging down the irretrievable drain of a roulette wheel while in some not-too-distant hotel bedroom a hooker is possibly preparing to leg it having just pilfered her asthmatic client's wallet. But for Brandon Flowers it's good night Sin City and a sober drive home where tomorrow his eldest son will rub his Neil Tennant-mocking whiskers and call him "a cactus" before they go melting moms' hearts down at the local bagel shop.
"I'm more comfortable now," he believes. "Recently I've been thinking maybe it's not a fluke. Maybe I deserve it after all. If I do, I'm not going to waste it. Man," and his grin says it all, "I want to shoot for the stars!"