The album that made Brandon Flowers say “this is what I’m going to do”
When a celebrity is asked about the ‘best advice they were ever given’, it’s what they call a ‘softball question’ in the biz, an opportunity for the successful, famous person to look humble, grounded, and appreciative of the folks who’ve helped them to the top.
It’s understandable that The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers might roll his eyes at this question after 20 years of hearing it, but his go-to answer is also interesting. Rather than quoting a family member or an artist he admired, Flowers has often gone in the opposite direction, recounting a “really bad piece of advice that I didn’t adhere to that became positive… It was from a heavy hitter at a record label, who I will leave nameless,” he explained to the Current in 2023.
“This person was just telling me that I needed to, or insinuating that I should be a star onstage and off the stage, and he would give examples of people that were making headlines for their behaviour, which wasn’t always like a stellar, great behaviour, you know? ” he added. “I sat there, and I was young, a young kid still, but I knew it didn’t feel right. And so I’ve tried my best to follow my own moral compass. And we’re lucky that we’ve worked out; I’m not so much a star off the stage in that respect. And so I didn’t take that advice. And that was good.”
In other words, the best advice Brandon ever got was the advice he gave himself to not listen to a blowhard record exec. Obviously, there’s no sin in being proud of yourself for dodging a bullet, and considering the huge success The Killers experienced early in their career, it’s fairly commendable that Flowers did stay true to his ethics and avoid the dark alleyways of the rockstar life.
Then again, we do tend to hold our rock stars to a weird, backwards standard sometimes, in which being slightly obnoxious and boring is somehow a worse misstep than becoming a drug addict or a womaniser. The glory days of rock ‘n’ roll are populated with so many tortured souls and selfish, out-of-control characters that we almost hold it against an artist like Flowers when he inhabits a version of that persona on stage without a hint of that real monster lurking underneath.
As the musician has freely admitted, he was drawn to rock ‘n’ roll by the raw components: the music and the theatre of it, far more than the lifestyle of it. Growing up in the ‘90s, in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death, the glamourous side of ‘the life’ was at an all-time low, so his biggest influence, as it turned out, was an artist and an album from an earlier era, but free from some of the seedier context of its own time.
“It’s funny, a lot of the bands I grew up listening to were influenced by David Bowie, but I didn’t go to that source until I was 19,” Flowers told the Current, “I got Hunky Dory, and for some reason, it’s a masterpiece, but for some reason, hearing that made me think, ‘Oh, this is what I’m going to do’. Even though it’s a very unattainable level of music for most people, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get there if I’ve ever gotten there or whatever, but that [album], for some reason, that was like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is what I’m going to do’.”
Had Flowers been a teenager in the 1970s, watching Bowie’s ascent to superstardom in real time, he might have found him an impossible artist to emulate, due to the other trappings of that sort of fame: the drugs, the groupies, the costuming, the constant scrutiny. Hearing Hunky Dory 30 years later, though, as a self-contained piece of art, made it feel like a launch point.
Does it still require some arrogance and obnoxiousness to hear David Bowie when you’re a teenager and think, “yeah, I can do that”? I suppose so. But if you actually pull it off and become a rock star in your own right, maybe following your own advice is the best solution, after all.
