The Killers have apologized after making some fans protest and leave their show at the Black Sea Arena in Shekvetili, Guria, Georgia on Tuesday (August 15). Towards the end of the band’s concert in the country, singer Brandon Flowers was booed when he welcomed a Russian fan onstage to play drums during their song “For Reasons Unknown,” and urged the crowd to think of one another as “brothers and sisters.”
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“We don’t know the etiquette of this land but this guy’s a Russian,” Flowers said to the crowd. “You okay with a Russian coming up here?”
After the band finished the song with their guest, Flowers continued to address the audience. “You can’t recognize if someone’s your brother?” he asked. “He’s not your brother? We all separate on the borders of our countries? Am I not your brother, being from America?”
Flowers then urged the audience to celebrate being “together.” “I don’t want it to turn ugly,” he added. “And I see you as my brothers and my sisters.” The crowd in the former Soviet state of Georgia, invaded by Russia in 2008, was audibly angry with Flowers’ gesture and some left the show.
“Good people of Georgia, it was never our intention to offend anyone!” the group wrote in a statement posted on their Twitter page following the concert. “We have a longstanding tradition of inviting people to play drums, and it seemed from the stage that the initial response from the crowd indicated that they were okay with tonight’s audience participation member.”
The band continued, “We recognize that a comment, meant to suggest that all of The Killers’ audience and fans are ‘brothers and sisters,’ could be misconstrued. We did not mean to upset anyone and we apologize. We stand with you and hope to return soon.”
Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia declared independence on April 9, 1991. In 2008, Russia launched a full-scale land, air and sea invasion of Georgia, and accused the country of genocide and aggression against the Russian-backed region of South Ossetia. Today, 20 percent of the Georgia territory remains under Russian occupation in the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions.
The recent war in Ukraine has also exacerbated some of the anti-Russian sentiment within the country.
“I think large parts of the Georgian public believe that Georgia is sort of indirectly at war with Russia,” said Ghia Nodia, a political science professor at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. “Of course, the war is in Ukraine, but many Georgians consider that this is also Georgia’s war, that Ukrainians are fighting Georgia’s war. And so that explains, I think, the general attitudes.”
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The Killers released their seventh album, Pressure Machine, in 2021 and are currently on an international tour, which continues in Slovakia on August 18 with additional dates in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. through October 20. The band is also scheduled to perform at the Primavera Sound Festival on December 2 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Photo: Taylor Hill/Getty Images
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