Brandon Flowers quipped that he and his Killers bandmates were “sweating bullets” as idol Bruce Springsteen joined them on stage in New York.
The ‘Somebody Told Me’ group were joined by The Boss and Jake Clemons, saxophonist for Springsteen’s E Street Band, at the world-famous Madison Square Garden at the weekend.
As well as performing the rock legend’s classics ‘Born to Run’ and ‘Badlands’, they joined Flowers and co for a rendition of the Springsteen-featuring ‘Dustland’.
Before performing their collaboration, Brandon said: “This part of the night is usually reserved for me to have people put their phones up. And I tell us to think about where your light comes from.”
He then divulged to 73-year-old Springsteen: “It is a very unusual circumstance for me tonight because I get a lot of my light from you.”
The gig ended on a high with ‘Born to Run’, and as Springsteen came back out, an excitable Brandon confessed: “Me and my friends have all been sweating bullets up here all night, because the Boss is here.”
‘Dustland’ is a remake of The Killers’ 2008 song ‘A Dustland Fairytale’, and Brandon previously admitted it was a real “pinch-me moment” being joined on one of his songs by The Boss.
The ‘Mr. Brightside’ hitmaker retold the story of him receiving a phone call from the ‘Dancing in the Dark’ rocker amid the COVID-19 pandemic and thinking it was someone playing a prank on him.
Asked how the collaboration came about, he shared: “Alright, well we were about to go… we were about to leave for England and it got shut down. We were promoting ‘Imploding The Mirage’ and then COVID was just starting to freak people out and then Universal, you know, we’re under the Universal umbrella, and they sort of sent out this blanket email to everybody saying ‘it’s kind of over, or do it at your own risk, but we don’t know what’s going on with COVID if you’re going to do promotion’, so we went home. And I was at the airport, and I started getting these texts from Bruce Springsteen but I didn’t have his number saved on my phone, and so I thought that it was someone messing, you know, I really thought it might be someone messing with me.
And anyway it turned out it was really him but one of the things he was saying was ‘we should do ‘Dustland’ one day’ and he thought maybe we’d cross paths touring or whatever, and obviously we all know what happened, we got shut down, and after months and months of sitting around I thought ‘why don’t we do a quarantine version of ‘Dustland”. And he was all for it and really cool about it, and we’re just … Man, it’s one of those pinch-me moments.”