There are several contenders for big singalongs at Glastonbury this weekend – chanting “la la la” with Kylie, or retelling Stormzy’s tale of Costa-brokered infidelity in Vossi Bop. But only one is sure to be heard as far as Stonehenge: a song about “jealousy/Turning saints into the sea”.
The Killers’ Mr Brightside only reached No 10 in the UK on its second release in 2004 (it didn’t chart at all when first released) – the band’s other hits Somebody Told Me, Human and When You Were Young all reached the top three. It had no big film, TV or advertising boost – its most significant crossover moment is soundtracking Cameron Diaz’s sozzled singing session in The Holiday.
Yet Mr Brightside became the longest-charting song in UK history, having appeared in the top 100 for a total of 208 weeks, 42 more than its closest competitor. No other track from before 2016 has been streamed more. It’s a karaoke favourite – Ed Balls chose to mark his defeat in the 2010 Labour leadership race with a rendition – and a fixture of weddings, student nights, indie discos and, yes, waterlogged British festivals. So how did a 16-year-old synthpop song by a Vegas indie band become a British anthem?
Perhaps because it was expressly engineered to mimic one. Despite growing up in the Nevada desert, Killers frontman Brandon Flowers spent his youth obsessing over British bands of the 80s and 90s (the band’s name is taken from New Order’s video for Crystal). Indulging in the relatively niche fandom of these bands felt, says Flowers, like “a very personal experience”. But in 2001 he attended an Oasis show that seemed “communal – it was the first time I felt that. There was some strange sort of spirituality.”
Bowled over by the mass euphoria, he set himself a new goal. “I wanted to write an answer to Don’t Look Back in Anger, which is a strange aspiration for a 20-year-old,” he says. Creating a song that had the Gallaghers’ knack for initiating impassioned group singalongs would mean channelling an emotional state both uniquely poignant and universally relatable. Fortunately, some suitable material soon arrived: the girlfriend who had accompanied Flowers to the Oasis gig ended their relationship, so he poured his first heartbreak into the first song the Killers ever wrote.
“The wound was raw,” he says, “so it was cathartic for me. There was still something really romantic about it: it was before phones. I actually put pen to paper and we were able to turn that into something universal. To make betrayal sound so good was just a lucky thing that I stumbled upon.”
He had a grab bag of musical inspirations, too. “When I look back at it now, I see little things that helped,” he says. “I Feel You by Depeche Mode – and Pet Shop Boys have a song called Jealousy that I love.” Another big influence was Queen Bitch by David Bowie. “I almost stole it – but I didn’t quite.” Armed with ideas, Flowers wrote Mr Brightside by driving around Las Vegas singing over a cassette tape of bandmate Dave Keuning’s guitar sketches. Fittingly, Spotify says it is now the song that appears most frequently on road trip-related playlists. But why that title? Flowers shrugs. “It was just something I came up with.”
The Killers first appeared during an era once christened the “new rock revolution” – the 00s resurgence of guitar bands, from the Strokes to Arctic Monkeys. Conor McNicholas, who edited NME between 2003 and 2009, put the full weight of his magazine’s influence behind the Killers. “I can’t emphasise how disruptive it was for a band to turn up and openly play keyboards,” he says. “It just felt like a dangerous idea at the time.”
The group’s popularity, however, is down to them not actually being very dangerous at all. “They had this fantastic mainstream appeal, because there was nothing not to like,” says McNicholas, who believes the song encapsulates this universal charm. “It has become this lingua franca between lots of different people that are into different stuff.”
The new rock revolution was the last time rock music doubled as the zeitgeist. Steve Lamacq was an early champion of Mr Brightside on the then-fledgling BBC 6Music, and thinks the genre’s decline might have something to do with the song’s long-haul appeal. “There’s something about that rousing sort of rock’n’roll that’s absent these days,” he says, which leaves Mr Brightside as “one of the surviving great anthems that has never been replaced”.
This popularity is due to it being fit for practically any occasion. As an indie song that both wallows in feelings of rejection and imbues them with euphoria, it works just as well in an insular, headphone bubble as the multi-generational dancefloor of a wedding reception, or the blokey bonding of the football terraces. McNicholas notes its party-starting potential, pointing out that the song is “fantastically upbeat. It’s got this on-beat thing, which sounds a bit like the Marseillaise. It operates on the one, the two, the three and the four beat, which is just bananas. It becomes a song you can’t ignore.”
Its 208 weeks on the UK chart eclipse the 38 it notched on the US Billboard top 100. Why do Brits particularly love it? Flowers says it’s down to the “lineage” between the Killers and a host of celebrated British artists. “British people must feel the influences, and we’ve never been quiet about where those influences came from. Oasis, the Pet Shop Boys, David Bowie, the Cure, the Smiths, and all that stuff I loved growing up – I think you can hear all those things in it.”
Mr Brightside’s trajectory is indicative of the way the modern music industry works: it has spread through playlist culture, to which its chameleonic, largely inoffensive nature is uniquely suited. It is on playlists because it is popular, and it is popular because it is on playlists. But its popularity boils down to something less technical and more human: the combination of melodrama and euphoria has lent it a deeply personal sense of time, place and meaning that will only intensify.
Zane Lowe remembers frequently playing the song in clubs in his indie disco DJ days, “just to get that adrenaline rush of watching people sing it back at you. Every time, you could see that it was giving them a moment. And those moments become something that you hold dear to you.” The intensity of that kind of musical interaction is what gives a song its longevity, agrees Lamacq. “Those people will take that record with them until their dying day. Another 1,000 weeks on the chart later, it will probably end up being the biggest funeral song of a generation.”
Flowers is sanguine about the fact that it will be sung louder than any other Killers songs when the band play the Pyramid stage on Saturday. “It’s OK. If we didn’t have other songs that people respond to, it would be different. But it is amazing. Having a song like that is every band’s dream.”
