For years, Frank Sinatra’s My Way held the record for the most week on the UK singles chart. That all changed in the digital era and has kept changing, but this week’s request now holds the record and seems unlikely to ever be challenged. A week before I wrote this, the Official Charts Company announced that Mr Brightside overtook Oasis’ Wonderwall as the biggest ‘selling’ single of all time without reaching Number one. The BBC, in their ever-positive way ran the headline, ‘The hit that won’t die’ Why should it?
Not one gig I do goes by without getting at least one request to play it. It’s still regularly on the radio and, at the time of writing, is still in the current top 75 on its record-breaking 41st re-entry. What is its appeal?
Thousands of songs have been written about a relationship break up, it’s arguably the most popular subject and this one is no different, its appeal is in the emotion and a subject that almost everyone can relate to.
The Killers were formed in 2001 in Las Vegas after lead singer Brandon Flowers had been fired from his first band Blush Response and later the same year came across an advert in a Las Vegas newspaper which had been posted by Dave Keuning, a guitarist who had relocated from Iowa. Flowers answered the ad and that was the beginning of a very successful band. In an interview with the New Musical Express (NME) Flowers recalled the roots of Mr Brightside, “We must’ve written it around the end of 2001. Dave and I were writing a ton of songs at the time, trying to figure out what it was that made us tick. I remember us going into the Virgin Megastore to buy The Strokes’ album Is This It on the day it came out and, when we put it on in the car, that record just sounded so perfect. I got so depressed after that, we threw away everything and the only song that made the cut and remained was Mr. Brightside. It originally came from this cassette of ideas that Dave gave me, and one of them was the Mr. Brightside riff. I was able to slap a chorus and some lyrics onto it, and I knew I liked it. But it wasn’t until we first tried it out with a drummer that I knew it was special. We went to the guy’s house and showed him the song, and I got the goosebumps after that.”
Flowers nearly didn’t end up as the front man. He remembered their debut gig, “It was terrible, awful. Before we went on, I was looking for a place on the floor to get rid of whatever I’d eaten that day. I didn’t throw up, but after my voice broke a couple of times I decided that I’d just play keyboards, because singing made me so nervous.” They even had trouble getting a record deal because their sound was compared to UK acts like the Cure which wasn’t well received in the States at that time. They sent out loads of demos in the US and UK and eventually Lizard King were interested and signed them. The label’s owner, Martin Heath said, “We signed The Killers in the summer of 2003 after everyone in America had turned them down. They had been out for a year looking for a deal but nobody was interested. It was very clear to me that he was a major star. He had huge charisma. He completely believed in what he was doing. He just stood out and carried the music.”
Flowers began writing the lyrics when he was around 19 years old and it stemmed from when he caught his girlfriend cheating on him. “I was asleep and I knew something was wrong,” he said in an interview with Q magazine. “I have these instincts. I went to the Crown and Anchor and my girlfriend was there with another guy. All the emotions in the song are real. When I was writing the lyrics, my wounds from it were still fresh. I am Mr. Brightside! But I think that’s the reason the song has persisted, because it’s real. People pick up on those things. And that goes all the way down to the production; we recorded it in a couple of hours, but it just sounds right, you know?”
The song has two verses, but if you know the song well enough, you’ll know that the second verse is the same as the first. At least in Herman’s Hermits’ song I’m Henry the VIII, I Am, he actually sings, ‘second verse, same as the first’. So why is that? “When I first heard those chords, I wrote the lyrics down and we didn’t waste much time,” Brandon Flowers recalled in an interview with Spin magazine. “That’s also why there’s not a second verse. The second is the same as the first. I just didn’t have any other lines and it ended up sticking.” Now you know.
On a number of occasions I have worked with bands at gigs and when they cover Mr Brightside, the short drum at 1m 54s differed a little from the single and I wondered if they couldn’t quite get it. When I asked a drummer he said that’s exactly how it is. Then I realised the original album version of it and the single are slightly different. The whole song is generally like that because Flowers sings the whole song with a sense of urgency which he once said was influenced by Queen Bitch, a track by David Bowie on his Hunky Dory album. He later mentioned to Rolling Stone “If you listen to the Lust for Life record, Iggy does a monotone delivery on Sweet Sixteen, and I was trying to sound like that. It’s just that I have a sweeter voice than Iggy, and I was a kid, so it came out the way it did.”
The song, when first released was limited to 500 CD singles but enough to interest Zane Lowe and Steve Lamacq who gave it an airing but 500 copies were never going to be enough to make it a hit. They released a second single, Somebody Told Me which became their first UK hit spending a couple of weeks on the chart and peaking at number 28. On the back of that, they re-recorded Mr Brightside in what the band called a more radio-friendly mix and it flew into the top 10 and that is where it peaked. Now they found a record deal in the States with Island records and peaked at number 10 over there too. It also spent a respectable 38 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. In the UK, it may have peaked at number 10, but flew down the chart as quick as it climbed leaving the listings after only four weeks. Even the accompanying video didn’t help despite an appearance by Izabella Miko who had been in Coyote Ugly and Julia Roberts’ brother, Eric, who also appeared in Mariah Carey’s number two hit We Belong Together. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Song but lost out to This Love by Maroon 5.
Over the following six years, the song kept bobbing in and out of the chart not getting any higher than number 47 and no more than two or three weeks on the chart, until 2013. What happened then? The power of television. The band performed it on The X Factor and it then cracked the top 30 again. Between then and the present day, it’s been in and out 41 times and its longest run was in March 2022 when in spend 29 weeks on the chart but got no higher than number 55. It makes for interesting reading in a world when the current charts are pretty boring viewing and listening as well as samey due to the chart rules being ever changed and seemingly, manipulated by the company who own the charts. They did, however, announce in May 2024 that Mr Brightside had overtaken Oasis’ Wonderwall to become the UK’s biggest-selling single not to make number one. A couple of Christmases ago, Wham!’s Last Christmas finally made number one 34 years after it had peaked at number two, and Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush made number one almost 37 years after it had peaked at number three, so don’t rule out the prospect of The Killers’ shining bright at number one one day.