Whether you’re about to make a discreet exit from the end of a wedding reception, fully in the midst of an alcohol-fuelled night out, or just half-listening to a playlist whilst doing your domestic chores, that beckoning opening arpeggio of Mr. Brightside never fails to grab the ear. It triggers an almost physiological response - rooted in the anticipation of the life-affirming hooks to come. You know it's inevitable that in a few seconds you'll be shouting its lyrics at the top of your voice.
Even after hearing it countless times in the twenty-three years since its initial release, Mr. Brightside’s perfectly-structured dynamic and melodic brilliance shows no signs of weakening.
Astonishingly, Mr. Brightside was the first song that Killers’ head honcho Brandon Flowers and guitarist Dave Keuning wrote together.
There are promising starts to fruitful songwriting partnerships - and then there's instantly birthing a future classic on your first go.
Mr. Brightside stands tall among the most streamed songs of the 2000s. Britain in particular has had a notable, long-term love affair with Mr. Brightside, with the song never leaving the top 100 of the British singles chart, and becoming the longest running UK chart success in its storied history.
It's a long-tail of interest that was hard to predict, considering the song only reached a peak of number 10 on release.
When sales and streams are combined, Mr. Brightside is actually the third biggest song of all time in the UK, prompting one Ed Sheeran to dub it Britain's true ‘national anthem’.
Although hailing from Las Vegas, the Killers naturally continue to feel a particular kinship with Britain - the country which fell for their particular blend of twisting guitars, dayglo synths and sparkling suit jackets first.
You might think Mr. Brightside's ubiquity would stick in the craw of its creators. But, the Killers don't hold to that odd inclination many notable artists have to diss their biggest song. Flowers in particular is still deeply in thrall to it.
“We’ve never not played that song live, because it’s stood the test of time and I’m proud of it,” said Flowers in an interview with Spin. “I never get bored of singing it.”
So how did a cash-strapped and dejected Las Vegas bellboy manage to come up with a modern classic?
Born in Las Vegas in 1981, the young Brandon Flowers found himself drawn towards Britain’s most compelling exports. Acts like the Smiths, the Cure, Depeche Mode, David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys all turned Brandon’s head. With these influences instilling an ear for melody, Flowers soon tried his hand at writing his own songs.
A few years later, and the 19 year-old Flowers - now working as a bellboy at Las Vegas’s Gold Coast Hotel and Casino (and paying $200 a month to his sister in exchange for a room) - was growing antsy. He was fixated on the dream of joining a bona-fide rock band and, eventually, hitting the big time.
There was a false start, when Brandon hitched himself up with local band Blush Response. However, Flowers’ stint as their keyboardist and sometime guitarist came to an abrupt end when the troupe decided to move to LA - leaving the crestfallen young Brandon behind.
“[That] was really hard,” Flowers told NME. “But it really made me go out and search for new horizons. It was a long search, but in the end it made me more determined.”
Scouring the local papers for fresh musical enterprises, Brandon decided to take a punt on a small ad placed by a guitarist named Dave Keuning. It read; “Seeking musicians for all original band. Influences: Oasis, Smashing Pumpkins, Bowie, Radiohead.”
A fan of all these (mainly British) musical touch-points, Flowers had a feeling that he and Keuning would click.
It was a modest hope in retrospect, but how could Flowers have expected to knock out one of the biggest songs of all time as a result of just one meeting?
"Our first phone call was just before 9/11 [2001], and we started practising right around 9/11,” Keuning remembered in an interview with NME. “I got fired just before then. After that event it was so hard to get a job.”
After a fairly amiable first meet up, Keuning gave Flowers a cassette tape of five of his early guitar ideas.
Sticking the tape into his car stereo on the way home, Brandon was captivated by the thorny but radiant arpeggio that defined the first instrumental sketch.
The riff, played by Dave high up the fretboard, was constructed via some unorthodox chord shapes, and its circular motion exuded a Johnny Marr-esque balance of both melody and rhythm.
It was an idea that Dave had been developing on his Gibson SG over the course of three months prior to meeting Brandon.
“I wrote Mr. Brightside in my closet,” Keuning told Music Week. “I had my amp set up in there - it was fairly soundproofed with all my clothes - and I had my Big Muff guitar pedal on. I was exploring different chord voicings and shapes and was playing this one voicing over and over again. I decided to change the bass note and move it around in different directions - up, down, sideways, diagonal - and then into the pre-chorus.”
Keuning continued, “I remember playing the riff [prior to meeting Brandon] and thinking, ‘This is a really good intro, it sounds like the beginning to a story’ and I made a demo because it just felt good. It was four tracks of guitars, including the main guitar part.”
In love with Keuning’s musical template, Flowers knew he had just the story that the demo was crying out for…
Recently, Brandon’s heart had been broken when he'd confirmed his suspicions that his then-girlfriend was cheating on him with another man.
“I was asleep and I knew something was wrong," Brandon recounted to Q Magazine back in 2009. "I have these instincts. I went to the Crown and Anchor [a Las Vegas pub] and my girlfriend was there with another guy."
Flowers’ lyric recounted the surrounding anguish and self-torment that he’d just endured.
Coming out of my cage and I've been doing just fine
Gotta, gotta be down because I want it all
It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?
It was only a kiss, it was only a kiss
When thinking about singing the verse, Flowers opted to maintain a one-note, fast-paced vocal approach that scanned with the song’s tonic in Db (with very occasional dips into C).
It was a choice that imparted a constricted feeling as the high-energy, 148bpm verse surged forward. Ultimately, this made it easy for anyone to sing along to - even those people who can’t hold a tune (or are very drunk!)
Eventually the lyrical tension reaches bursting point as the gnawing sense of unease reaches unbearable levels. Flowers is plagued by visions of what he imagines is taking place behind his back…
Now I'm falling asleep and she's calling a cab
While he's having a smoke and she's taking a drag
Now they're going to bed and my stomach is sick
And it's all in my head, but she's touching his…
When choosing the most opportune words for the tale, Flowers made a conscious nod to one of his formative idols, David Bowie. With its reference to ‘calling a cab’ and his ‘stomach being sick’ a knowing crib from Queen Bitch. “I was obsessed with [Bowie album] Hunky Dory when I was 19,” Flowers told Rolling Stone. “There’s an urgency to that, and it felt like he meant business, so I was like, ‘All right, I want to do that.”
Having educated himself on the techniques of the past masters of pop, Flowers knew that he could tee up the eventual soaring chorus by switching his singing style for a more melodious pre-chorus.
“There’s an anthemic quality in the pre-choruses, and we learned a lot about things like that from listening to Oasis,” Brandon told Rolling Stone. “You can really hear those influences seeping in on Hot Fuss and the way we set up the chorus on [Mr. Brightside]. I think the anthemic quality is me trying to beat [Oasis’] Don’t Look Back in Anger or [U2’s] Where the Streets Have No Name.”
Rather than continuing the verse’s suggested rhyme with… well, the obvious, Flowers plunged into a new rhyme scheme, beginning with ‘chest’
…Chest now
He takes off her dress now
Let me go
'Cause I just can't look, it's killing me
And taking control
The song plateaued with a euphoric chorus for the ages. Deploying a triumphant melodic structure, the 'you're better off without them' sentiment recalled the spirit of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive - and would eventually resonate with millions.
A closer look at the lyric, however, indicates that the optimistic outlook of its titular character is perhaps the reason he's so frequently taken for a ride. It's the price he pays for seeing the best in people…
Jealousy
Turning saints into the sea
Swimming through sick lullabies
Choking on your alibis
But it's just the price I pay
Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
'Cause I'm Mr. Brightside
While some have taken the lyric’s protestations of ‘it’s all in my head’ to mean that there's an implication that the affair is a paranoid self-creation, Flowers remained adamant that the song was pointedly about his own actual experience of being cheated on.
“All the emotions in the song are real,” Brandon told the NME in 2012. “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.”
We can only imagine how Keuning felt when he listened to how his neat arpeggio idea had grown into this prospective hit. The pair promptly rustled up a demo using a drum machine to provide rhythmic backing.
There was one snag however - Flowers hadn’t yet penned a second verse.
So, for now, he just repeated the first verse again.
Flowers never did get around to coming up with a second verse, but in many ways, this repetition of that ‘coming out of my cage’-led first verse (albeit with some minor emphasis alterations) would become crucial to the track’s ongoing success. It gave millions of future listeners two chances to absorb the words.
The next time they heard the song, that first verse sounded even more familiar.
Following a few sessions at Kill the Messenger Studio in Henderson, Nevada with first drummer Matt Norcross, Mr. Brightside soon became locked-in as the proto-band’s central song. An exuberant bridge (which cheekily incorporated Beethoven’s Ode to Joy) underlined that its creators knew that this was something special.
“[Being unemployed] was a blessing in disguise,” recalled Dave in NME. “Because it allowed me and Brandon to spend lots of time together - writing songs, working on ideas, coming up with a name and a feel for the band. Having that time turned out to be a huge blessing.”
Taking their band name from the fictional outfit in New Order’s music video for their 2001 song Crystal, the Killers soon fully assembled, with the addition of bassist Mark Stoermer and new drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr.
The foursome began hitting the Las Vegas scene hard. Out went the bulk of the early material, but the obvious winner Mr Brightside remained.
“Once me and Ronnie joined the band, it changed,” remarked Mark Stoermer in an interview with Cuepoint. “Once we started recording a new record, they ditched a lot of their old songs. We started writing together, it was around that time that we were finding this line-up and having some new songs.”
Although US label interest was initially lukewarm, the Killers caught the attention of UK label Lizard King on the strength of a five song demo. They were promptly signed.
So, in Britain, Mr. Brightside (and other future hit, Somebody Told Me) were promptly put out as singles. Eventually, the Killers signed to Island Def Jam records in the US.
“There was almost this revival of indie rock and rock & roll in general after a lull of bands in the mid to late 90s,” recalled Stoermer. “I think things like The Strokes and Interpol gave us hope for something like us to possibly get signed around that time, and also had an influence too even on the music.”
An early performance video captures the song's rough potency. Although the band clearly had some way to go, the lack of enthusiasm from the crowd captured in response to what is now such a staple on the pop cultural songbook is an odd thing indeed…
Recorded with producer Jeff Saltzman at The Hearse and Cornerstone studios in Berkley, California, the Killers’ debut Hot Fuss was stacked with hits. but it was the band's earliest cut that shone brightest.
Surprisingly, most of the mixes on this now era-defining record were intended to be demos. Having heard how urgent they felt, the band opted to leave the basic tracks alone.
“Mr. Brightside was the first song we produced, and I mixed that on an 8 input console, with no automation, in about 35 minutes,” recalled mix engineer Mark Needham in an interview with Modern Mixing. “That’s the mix that ended up on the record, even though I wanted to redo it.”
For Flowers’ vocal, there was a notable delay effect added that imbued it with a suitably retro, lo-fi quality. “[Line 6] Echo Farm had just come out, and that was really the only vocal effect he had,” remembered Needham. “If you open up Echo Farm, the first setting that comes up is the default setting, which overdrives the vocal a bit and sets an 84 ms delay. That was basically what he put on everything [laughs] and it sort of became the default vocal tone on the whole record.”
Although an earlier live performance video was shot to accompany the initial single release in September 2003, the single’s re-issue in May 2004 to presage the imminent release of Hot Fuss the following month resulted in a higher-budget music video being shot. This video would become the most well-known of the two.
Directed by Sophie Muller, the Moulin Rouge!-evoking video depicted a love triangle between Flowers and actor Izabella Miko, and - the villain of the piece - a particularly sinister Eric Roberts.
“[That was] the first major production we were a part of,” Flowers said in an interview on the video for Vevo’s Watch This series. “It was the first time we’d been in a huge sound stage with loads of cameras.”
The impact of Hot Fuss - which hit #7 in the US and (naturally) topped the chart in the UK - transformed the Killers into global superstars, filling arenas and inciting singalongs for decades to come. Filled with impeccable, characterful pop songwriting, it remains a cherished time capsule of the mid-2000s.
As the album's outrider, Mr. Brightside seemingly missed the call to stop galloping.
Instead it continued to surge ever onward to reach its surprising stature in the history of popular music. It’s currently sitting comfortably with over three billion plays on Spotify (making it the most streamed song from the 2000s on the service) It’s spent over 440 weeks in the British charts, and it won’t be leaving any time soon.
“It’s a great song,” Dave Keuning told Music Week in 2023. “The chorus is timeless and I’m proud that it has lasted so long. Some songs don’t survive the test of time and there are others you never get sick of. And apparently Mr. Brightside is one that people never get sick of, because it’s been around this long.”
Flowers, interviewed on the twenty-year anniversary of Mr. Brightside by the Guardian in 2023, remains similarly besotted by the song that is now bigger than the band itself. It's fair to say that it's easily eclipsed the relationship that inspired it.
“I really don’t get bored of it. I’m able to feed off of the excitement of somebody who’s there, hearing it for the first time. I still get a thrill. My concern is that it’s going to turn on us and there’s going to be a backlash, but it just keeps growing.”
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