Brandon Flowers at 3Olympia review: A master of arena rock still excited by his hits

Brandon Flowers

3Olympia Theatre, Dublin★★★★★

Brandon Flowers is in Dublin to perform material from his country-rock themed new album Thrasher – but two-thirds of the way through this riotous concert that plan is chucked out the window and he goes for broke with a murderously enjoyable Killers greatest hits set.

Experienced in the comparatively intimate environs of The Olympia, it’s a thrill to see a master of arena rock still so excited by his own hits. Flowers rips through the Springsteen-esque two-hander of When You Were Young and Read My Mind and then charges, at full pelt, into the great terrace anthem of the 21st century, Mr Brightside.

How can he not be bored with this song by now? But somehow he is not, as, with one foot on the edge of the stage, he leads the audience through that surging verse and then headlong into a chorus that remains almost supernaturally catchy despite everyone in the room having already heard it at least 10,000 times in their life.

He’s wearing a sort of formal cowboy suit which, when you factor in his cheesy smile, makes him look like Tom Cruise playing Johnny Cash – but the effect is pure rock star magnetism. It’s almost enough to make you gloss over the constant choruses of olé, olé, olé – aka cringe on a stick – that rise up whenever he has something to say between the music.

The Killers stuff is a delight – it’s impossible not to be caught up in the enthusiasm Flowers has for his music, inspired by his teenage love for New Order, The Smiths and Depeche Mode. But the Thrasher material has its own charms and has a receptive audience in Ireland, where country music has its own long history and a devoted following.

Flowers inherited his love of country from his father as the family moved around between rural towns in Nevada and Utah and he reveals that his public persona as Las Vegas rock star is largely a disguise. “I spent a long time being embarrassed by that music,” he says early in the performance. “Tonight, I’m gonna play it to you.”

The Killers are mainstream rockers – but Flowers’s solo material tends towards the dark and personal. That is particularly true of Thrasher, which is full of often unflinching diaristic vignettes from his time growing up as a Vegas transplant to one-horse Henderson, Nevada and tiny Nephi, Utah. Flowers talks about how he was picked on for being useless at sport (“better to be bullied a little than be a bully”) and then introduces the stark Miss America by explaining it is about his older sister’s experience of domestic abuse.

[ Brandon Flowers: Thrasher review – An all-in love letter to the country rock the Killers frontman grew up onOpens in new window ]

The evening isn’t all heavy going, though. There’s a cameo by his songwriting friend Alex Cameron, who teams up to sing their co-write Runnin’ Outta Luck – an 80s-inspired synth-pop bop that could have come straight from the soundtrack to Kevin Bacon’s Footloose.

After the highs of the Killers material, the show, which has now passed into its third hour, concludes with An American Dream – a phantasmagorical power ballad where Flowers contemplates mortality and shares a surreal vision in which he meets Elvis driving a Tesla. It’s more David Lynch than Depeche Mode – but after the fireworks that preceded it, Flowers has earned the right to bring down the curtain any way he sees fit.