Las Vegas Weekly

Chatting with 30 Seconds to Mars guitarist Tomo Milicevic

30 Seconds to Mars returns to Sin City to top off 2010 at the Pearl.

Kenneth Cappello

30 Seconds to Mars has been to Vegas a few times this year. Anything stand out?

I’m a lover of Vegas, I have to admit it. I love the filth and the raunch and all of it, and I’m a fan of gambling. For me and my chick, we come there and we just have a blast. We’ve never really done an official New Year’s Eve show, so we were like, “Let’s go to Vegas and celebrate the end of the year together and have a concert and do the whole thing.”

How will the New Year’s Eve show differ from previous gigs?

Something we do often is a 30 Seconds to Mars theme night, where we’ll put out a Twitter blast and get all the fans to participate in a common theme for the show. We’ve done War Paint night, or White Night, where everyone dresses in all white clothes, and we do, too. We also do funny stuff like Yuppie Night and Doctor Night. But in honor of the release of our new video for “Hurricane” we’re doing an S&M/bondage theme for New Year’s Eve, which we thought was quite fitting for Vegas, where everyone’s just a bunch of freaks anyways.

How did the band decide to invite fans onstage during concert finale “Kings and Queens”?

If you look back to the beginning of this record, the theory behind it and the things that we were trying to do, it’s all about sharing the experience with people. For us it’s a very common, very natural thing to want to include people as much as possible, so people can really feel like they can have some ownership of their band.