"Can you believe our baby's over 10 years old now?" muses the Killers' singer Brandon Flowers, wistfully reflecting upon his band's first-decade rise from breakout Las Vegas indie-rockers to stadium-fillers. "We're so proud of him."
Their boy may be growing up faster than they'd like. Last year's contract fulfilling best-of, Direct Hits, was lamented by drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr as "a douchie move". This vast, open-air show sees all those hits, with their colourful cocktail of Springsteen, U2 and miscellaneous Anglophile synth-pop, consummately rendered. Yet they're accompanied neither by new material – the Anthony Gonzalez-produced Shot at the Night aside – nor the pyrotechnics and other visual extravagances that can make Killers shows fabulously watchable spectacles.
Dressed in a rhinestone pink jacket, Flowers sings at times from behind an illuminated lightning-bolt keyboard stand resembling a kind of fantastically camp lectern. He's done his research: he congratulates Scotland on a successful Commonwealth Games. And later, backed by Dave Keuning's guitar, he leads a stripped-down singalong to Don't You (Forget About Me) by the Glaswegians Simple Minds. When the Killers play synth-spangled radio staple Human, it's to the glow of enough electronic devices to make Kate Bush go back into hiding.
That song's chorus line, "Are we human or are we dancer?", was recently voted the weirdest lyric ever, which seems harsh. The bombastic refrains to the main-set closer All These Things That I've Done ("I've got soul but I'm not a soldier"), and the penultimate number When You Were Young ("He doesn't look a thing like Jesus") are equally inane, even if their capacity to make grown men roar at the night sky in non-specific triumph feels oddly praiseworthy.
Credit to Flowers, too, for pausing the show when a fight breaks out in the crowd – an awkward delay for which he chides both the antagonist and slow-acting security, with the band primed to play, as he puts it, "our two best songs". Mr Brightside closes with a magnificent salvo of hooks within hooks, but contrary to reasonable expectation, no fireworks.
• On 21 August at the Tennent's Vital festival, Belfast. Box office: 0844-847 2455.
