How The Killers' Mr Brightside got 'legendary status'

It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?

It's a question that has rung out across dancefloors for more than 20 years.

The answer, for The Killers' Mr Brightside, lies in breaking chart records... if not actually topping the charts.

The 2000s indie-rock anthem has now overtaken Oasis' Britpop ballad Wonderwall to become the UK's biggest-selling single never to reach number one.

According to the Official Charts Company, Mr Brightside's 5.57 million combined sales and streams also make it the UK's third biggest song of all time, surpassing Wham!'s festive staple Last Christmas.

This is calculated from an eye-watering 530.3 million streams (100 paid streams or 600 free streams equal one sale) and 1.1 million copies sold since it was first released in 2003.

It already holds the record for the UK's longest-running chart hit, after spending 408 weeks - or seven whole years - in the UK top 100. Its closest competitor, Lewis Capaldi's Someone You Loved, is far behind, with 234 weeks in the countdown at the time of writing.

Mr Brightside is streamed 1.8 million times a week on average in the UK. Last year proved its most successful on streaming services, with a cool 80 million plays.

Not bad for a song that only reached number 10 in the UK on its second release in 2004 - and didn't chart at all the first time around.

Now a crowd favourite from indie discos to wedding dancefloors and karaoke bars, nowhere is its cross-generational appeal more evident than at the band's live festival shows.

Luke Broadhurst, 51, says the song is "one of the few the whole family loves", including his teenage son and daughter.

"Festivals have given it legendary status for us, from Latitude, with my then 10-year-old old daughter Roxy on my shoulders, to seeing them headline Glastonbury in 2019.

"Being part of 130,000 fans was about as biblical an experience as you can get."

Roxy, now 17, says experiencing Mr Brightside at Reading Festival with her friends was "the best thing I've seen live - uplifting, a sense of unity, it's seen as the national anthem.

"At house parties people belt out the lyrics, it's a classic."

Reflecting on the song's seismic impact, The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers told the Official Charts Company: "It's incredible. I recently went to see Ed Sheeran in Las Vegas, and I joined him for a version of Mr Brightside.

"These are people that may not be Killers fans, but it just lit up like a casino in this place when we started playing Mr Brightside."

So how did it all happen?

Flowers wrote the lyrics when he was about 20, after discovering his girlfriend had been cheating on him.

Around that time, Flowers met guitarist Dave Keuning, who'd already written Mr Brightside's backing track. As soon as Flowers heard that chiming riff, his heartbreak spilled onto the page.

"When I first heard those chords, I wrote the lyrics down and we didn't waste much time," he told 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."

The primitive demo was a much darker song. Flowers alternately sounds angry and on the verge of tears - his vocals raw and raspy against a grungy, fuzztone guitar.

But when it came to recording the studio version, he adopted a more detached, almost voyeuristic tone.

Mr Brightside was the first complete song The Killers wrote - and the only track to survive from the original version of their debut album, Hot Fuss.

All the other songs were scrapped after The Strokes released Is This It, a record that redefined US guitar music at the start of the millennium.

"That record just sounded so perfect," Flowers told the NME in 2012. "We threw away everything [we were working on] and the only song that made the cut and remained was Mr Brightside."

The Killers debuted Mr Brightside at their first ever show, in Las Vegas in 2002 - a gig Flowers later recalled was "terrible".

Things didn't improve for some time. Their sound, heavily influenced by British bands like The Cure, New Order and Depeche Mode, was unpalatable to the US record industry. It wasn't until their demo found its way to UK indie label Lizard King that they landed a record deal.

"Everyone in America had turned them down," said label boss Martin Heath. He was particularly impressed by the band's frontman. "It was very clear to me that he was a major star. He had huge charisma."

Lizard King released Mr Brightside in 2003 in a limited run of 500 CD singles, and it got its first review in The Times.

"Mr Brightside is one of those records that come along all too rarely and make you think, hel-lo," wrote Dan Cairns. "A fantastically bleak and catchy ode to romantic paranoia and jealousy, it nails that moment in a love affair when one half is suddenly forced to accommodate the possibility that the other half is playing away."

Despite the buzz, 500 copies wasn't enough to make a dent in the charts, and The Killers seemed destined to become a footnote in musical history. But destiny was calling them...

After a second single, Somebody Told Me, crept into the top 40, The Killers were signed to Island Records in America and Mr Brightside was re-released. This time, the song caught fire, making the top 10 in both the UK and US.

Even so, there was no indication that Mr Brightside would become a defining anthem of the 2000s. Flowers first realised Mr Brightside could become one of those songs when The Killers played Glastonbury's John Peel tent in 2004.

Pretty soon, the song began to reappear in the lower reaches of the charts. It made number 100 in the first week of 2005, as fans spent their Christmas record tokens (remember those?) on the remaining copies of the single.

Once downloads started being counted towards the countdown in July 2005, Mr Brightside would pop into the charts every time The Killers played a festival or toured the UK.

Meanwhile, the song became a staple of wedding parties and student discos. Ed Balls shrugged off his defeat in the 2010 Labour leadership race with a karaoke version, and Coronation Street star Andy Whyment made it his party piece on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.

In December 2018, Mr Brightside reached the landmark of one million pure sales (ie downloads and CD sales). But its unparalleled chart run truly began in 2014, when the Official Chart Company incorporated streams into its calculations.

Since then, it has taken up semi-permanent residence in the lower reaches of the countdown, becoming the most-streamed song of any track released before 2010.

At the time of writing, it features on 60 million separate Spotify playlists. The company says it's most likely to appear on playlists designed for road trips, although it also features on Billie Eilish's Life Playlist and compilations from Ultimate Party Classics to Darts: All the Walk-On Songs.

While some bands grow to resent the idea of being forever associated with their debut single, Flowers has said he's proud Mr Brightside has "stood the test of time", insisting in 2015: "I never get bored of singing it."

Fans, it seems, never get bored of hearing it either.

This article updates an earlier version first published in April 2021, when Mr Brightside was announced as the UK's longest-running chart hit.