Tense, angry, universal: why Mr Brightside is song of the century

One night, a little over 20 years ago, Brandon Flowers walked into the Crown and Anchor in his hometown of Las Vegas in Nevada, and changed his life for ever. The bad news was that his girlfriend was kissing another man. “I was distraught!” says the singer for the Killers. “I poured my heart out and told the truth.”

The good news, then, was that poor Flowers got a song out of that ordeal — Mr Brightside, a hit that, last week, became the UK’s biggest selling single that did not reach No 1, taking a crown previously worn by Wonderwall by Oasis. Mr Brightside peaked at No 10 in 2004, but combined sales and streams of 5.57 million also makes it the country’s third biggest song of all time, recently overtaking Last Christmas by Wham!

Furthermore, with its 400 weeks in the top 100, the song has spent more top time in the UK’s Official Charts than any other — not bad for a track that, upon its initial release in 2003, flogged only a measly 500 copies. David Cameron even came on stage to it at the Tory party conference in 2014. So it started out with a kiss, but how, indeed, did it end up like this?

Before he was famous, Flowers was a Mormon teen in Vegas, obsessed with British music. He loved the Cure, New Order and Depeche Mode and wanted to be in a band like fellow Americans the Strokes and the White Stripes, who were leading a cool, tight, exciting rock revival. It was in the early 2000s and the Killers were, essentially, just Flowers and guitarist Dave Keuning, struggling around fleapit venues in a gambling city, without a hit that labels would take notice of.

Then came that night at the Crown and Anchor and, like dozens before him, Flowers poured his heartache into music. “She’s touching his chest now/ He takes off her dress now!” goes Mr Brightside and, frankly, if you do not know what he is talking about, you have probably never been in love.

In demos, Flowers sung it angrily, inspired by Queen Bitch by David Bowie, before shifting to a distant vocal style, mimicking Iggy Pop. But the genius is that, writing in a rush, Flowers repeated verse one where there would usually be a verse two. As such, he ratchets up tension, simply going over the pain again, panicked, terrified, like a jilted lover looking at photos of an ex, over and over again online.

And that is why the song worked back then, and continues to do so — it is, essentially, music for your adolescence, tapping into the first real pain and anguish that many of us feel and never goes away. Look at the crowd when the band headlined Reading Festival last summer. Most people bellowing out the lyrics were not even born when Flowers wrote it. “There were a lot of times when I would just sit in the car and cry to Mr Brightside,” said Billie Eilish, who was one when it came out. It is my nine-year-old’s favourite song and the only thing he loves is Nintendo Switch.

“I don’t really feel a part of it any more,” says Flowers of his biggest moment — one that, live, they stretch out for eight minutes. “It just exists in the world and I feel a little removed from it, because it’s so big.” Michael Stipe said similar about REM’s Losing My Religion, but Mr Brightside is, certainly, the most recent song to become this universal, flying in the face of what is now a fractured music industry.

A couple of years ago, while discussing the changing ways we listen to pop, Neil Tennant, the songwriter and member of the Pet Shop Boys, told me: “I always define a hit as something you have to make no effort to hear.” He does not believe, for instance, that Taylor Swift has any “famous songs” and despite her unparalleled fame, he has a point.

There is footage online of an entire stadium in Michigan singing Mr Brightside. The Killers are not playing, it is spontaneous, and there is not a Swift track that would work in the same way. If she is the biggest artist of the century, this is the century’s biggest song.

“We look up to U2,” Flowers once said. “And to have just one great song, like Where the Streets Have No Name, would be an accomplishment.” Next month, the Killers embark on their latest jaunt around the UK. They ended up with a lot of hits — this is the Greatest Hits tour — but everyone waits for the big one, with its spidery guitar, fractured drumming, pounding bass and lyrics from a broken heart. A strange and desperate song, well on its way to be our most popular of all time.