The Killers’ Brandon Flowers: ‘Nothing has ever gone smoothly’ When he came to start work on The Killers’ fifth studio album, Wonderful Wonderful, Brandon Flowers, frontman of arguably America’s […]

When he came to start work on The Killers’ fifth studio album, Wonderful Wonderful, Brandon Flowers, frontman of arguably America’s most dysfunctional still-functioning band, struggled with something he had never previously encountered: writer’s block.

“I just couldn’t find anything meaningful to write about,” he says. His attentions were elsewhere, with good reason: at home in Las Vegas, his wife was suffering from serious anxiety and depression issues.

“I kept coming back to all that as a subject, but it was very sensitive. It was a difficult, emotional time for us.”

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Each morning, he would sit at his piano – a gift from Sir Elton John, a close family friend – hoping it might give him inspiration, and later he asked another rock star friend, Bono, for help through his slump. For the U2 singer, a man used to building bridges, ending wars and eradicating suffering, this was an easy ask. He simply asked Flowers whether he thought every song had already been written.

Flowers was so taken with the idea that he promptly wrote a song about it, and called it “Have All the Songs Been Written?”. Bono’s magic thus dispensed, the songs flowed, the bulk revolving around the only truly important thing in his life: his wife Tana, and the problems she was trying to see her way through. “Can’t do this alone/We need you at home,” he sings on “Some Kind of Love” in response to an acute depressive episode. When we talk about this song, tears come to his eyes. “Sorry, it’s still pretty emotional for me.”

Flowers is an almost comically well-assembled 36-year-old, so much so that even 10 hours on an aeroplane cannot undermine his appearance. He arrives at our interview looking crumpled, certainly, his Wranglers undeniably slept in, his hair unkempt and chin unshaved, but the cumulative effect only makes him resemble even more that mythical, square-jawed all-American male.

He arrives alone. The Killers are, or at least until recently were, a quartet, but they have fractured of late. There are now only two full-time members: Flowers and drummer Ronnie Vannucci. Mark Stoermer, the dreamily distant bassist, has resigned from all touring commitments in favour of studying for an MA in art, and guitarist Dave Keuning, a man who rarely spoke when silence was an option, has also stepped permanently off the road.

“We’ve always struggled,” Flowers shrugs of the band members’ disparate dynamics. “We’ve struggled on the road, in the studio. Nothing has ever gone smoothly. We should be on our eighth album now, our ninth, but things always got complicated. We want different things, I guess.” Do they remain friends? He laughs dryly. “We’re not meeting up at [American restaurant chain] Chili’s very often, put it that way.”

The Killers’ swift global success was a dream come true for Flowers, a devout Mormon who had grown up on a diet of the very best of 1980s British pop – The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, New Order – and channelled that into the band’s 2004 debut, Hot Fuss. Early tracks such as “Mr Brightside” and “All These Things That I’ve Done” quickly sent them stadium-bound.

With 2006’s Sam’s Town, they deliberately shifted gear in favour of rock, now channelling Bruce Springsteen. Flowers grew whiskers and sported leather accordingly. This strict Mormon was by now taking the business of becoming an emergent rock star very seriously indeed.

“I was already drinking,” he says, “but things progressed a little after that.” Does he mean drugs? “Um, I won’t talk about it in too much in detail, but I felt a responsibility to, almost – you know, to put on the boots I was attempting to lace up. But it never got out of control. I started to notice I was making pretty poor decisions, and doing things that weren’t going to lead to happiness.”

And so he cleaned up and sought instead another addiction, specifically physical fitness. He now works out five days a week, he tells me. “It’s difficult not to do seven, but they say you should give your body time to recover. It’s pretty addictive, though.”

Two further Killers albums followed – 2008’s Day & Age and 2012’s Battle Born – and Flowers felt the need to release a couple of solo albums when it became clear his unswerving commitment to work was not necessarily shared by the rest of the band. “We are different people, and I’m a very confrontational person,” he says. “But I am working on it.”

When I ask him how, he answers, without hesitation: therapy. He had therapy, and then encouraged his band to join him. “We did it a few times, but even then, not everybody turned up, and when they did, not everybody talked. It wasn’t always a comfortable situation…” Nevertheless, it worked. Without therapy, Wonderful Wonderful wouldn’t exist.

This latest album, while full of typical Killers vitality, is by some distance their most intimate, because of the direction Flowers’ songwriting took. The references to his wife’s illness and ongoing recovery may be elliptical, but they pack a punch. “And I shall give thee great cause to rejoice,” he sings almost biblically in the title track. “Be of good cheer/Mine arm is reached out, I am here/I’ll crush every doubt/And every fear.”

He explains that his wife had been suffering from an extreme type of post-traumatic stress disorder, complex PTSD, the consequence of multiple traumatic events in early life. “They had always been something there. Even though she’s got a sparkle – she can light up a room – there was always a sadness, a heaviness.”

We’ve always struggled, on the road, in the studio. Things always got complicated. We wanted different things, I guess

The sadness didn’t fully manifest until her mid-thirties. In talking about it now, Flowers looks distraught. “It’s hard to explain much more without talking about her family,” he says. “They are all still alive, these people, these people who are basically the culprits. We don’t want them resurfacing, or coming out of the woodwork.”

So why tackle the subject in song at all? Well, he reasons, he did so as part of the therapeutic process, for both her and him. Tana is in therapy now, he reports, and on medication. He suggests she is getting better, and again his eyes fill with tears. “We were definitely in trouble at times, trying to understand what was going on, what my role was, and all the while we were trying to take care of each other, our three boys…”

As part of their recovery process, the family have left Las Vegas (“too many bad memories”) for Utah, Mormon HQ, and light years away from where rock stars are supposed to settle. “I never wanted to be a celebrity,” he notes.

But he does want to remain a singer and, ideally, a singer fronting The Killers. “But if we do stop, if we do break up, I wouldn’t be able to stop what I’m doing. It’s just something I have in me, that hunger. I’m hungry still.”

‘Wonderful Wonderful’ is out today. The Killers tour the UK from 6-28 November