The Cure song that changed Brandon Flowers’ life
The impact bands can have on teenagers is transformative and can change a person’s entire perspective on the world. For The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, it didn’t even take an album to change his life. Instead, it was one song by The Cure which made him see in illuminating colours for the first time, and he’s never looked back.
Flowers credits his love of music to his older brother, who is 12 years his senior, and from an early age, he indoctrinated his sibling. Although he grew up in Nevada, his music collection had a strong British element, with bands like The Smiths, The Cure, Duran Duran and New Order on constant rotation in his house.
Later, he found David Bowie, and everything suddenly made sense as he joined the dots in his head. Flowers told The Guardian: “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.”
However, Flowers would never have reached the point of Bowie without The Cure, who played an equally pivotal role in his musical journey. During a performance with The Killers at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center in 2018, the frontman recalled the seismic moment he watched the English band at the same venue on August 8th, 1996.
“It was wonderful and I had a wonderful experience,” Flowers said to the audience. The vocalist continued: “They played this song Push. I was converted, I was officially converted and baptised by this song ‘Push’.”
In homage to The Cure, The Killers treated the Salt Lake City crowd to a cover of ‘Push’, which instantly empowered his existence after witnessing it in the flesh. Notably, it was also the first concert he had ever attended, which exacerbated his obsession with music to a new degree.
During a conversation with Rolling Stone, he reflected on that specific concert and again highlighted the brilliance of ‘Push’. Flowers recalled: “They played a song called ‘Push’. I wasn’t familiar with The Head on the Door yet, which has become one of my favourite Cure records. But when they played ‘Push,’ the room changed, and my life changed. I can still see the stage and the smoke and people’s hair. It really effected me, that song. And it still does.”
If Flowers’ older brother had never converted him into a fan of The Cure, he’d have likely missed their visit to Salt Lake City. As a result, the musician may have never formed The Killers, who have headlined the same holy venue on multiple occasions.
Watch footage of The Killers covering ‘Push’ below.
