The Killers’ Mr Brightside becomes biggest song never to top the UK charts

It never made it to No 1 but it’s doing just fine...

The song that started out with a kiss has helped The Killers claim the longest-running track in the UK Top 100 chart without ever actually reaching the No 1 spot.

“Mr Brightside”, the immortal and unescapable rock tune heard at weddings, karaoke and Noughties-themed club nights the world over, has achieved a combined 5.57 million sales and streams, which also makes it the UK’s third biggest song of all time.

The Las Vegas band’s betrayal anthem, which was released in 2003 and featured on the band’s debut album Hot Fuss, managed to usurp sales of other hits such as Wham!’s “Last Christmas” and “Wonderwall” by Oasis, having spent a total of 408 weeks, or seven years, in the UK Top 100.

Reacting to the news, frontman Brandon Flowers admitted to the Official Charts Company that he feels like the song no longer belongs to the band.

“It’s funny. I don’t feel so much of it anymore. It just exists in the world,” he said.

“It’s amazing that I had something to do with it, but I almost feel a little bit removed from it because it’s so big.”

The song’s popularity shows no sign of waning, with Britons continuing to stream it around 1.8 million times each week, keeping it ahead of its closest competitor, “Someone You Loved” by Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi.

The Killers’ frontman Brandon Flowers says he no longer feels like the song belongs to the band (Getty Images for iHeartMedia)

In fact, 2024 has so far seen an increase in “Mr Brightside” streams, as it jumped 23 per cent in combined weekly streams and sales on the previous year.

The biggest year of pure sales for the song was 2012, when it was bought and downloaded 125,000 times.

In a feature for The Independent around the song’s 20th anniversary last year, critic Mark Beaumont explored how the song had managed to achieve such enduring popularity, along with the story of how it earned the band a showcase for record label Warner.

“Suddenly, out of nowhere I heard this riff,” A&R scout Alex Gilbert recalled. “The riff is one of the greatest riffs of all time. I kid you not, I listened to ‘Mr Brightside’ about 52 times in a row.

“I was shocked and wowed and thrilled, I was like a child. I couldn’t believe a song could smack that hard. It was distinctive, it’s got soul, it’s got passion, the lyric is killer. It made me happy in a dark way, and I think that’s what all great pop songs should do.”

‘Destiny is calling me’: The Killers pictured in 2004, L-R: Ronnie Vannucci, David Keuning, Brandon Flowers and Mark Stoermer (Getty Images)

Despite the staying power of “Mr Brightside”, it is not their biggest hit in the UK – “Somebody Told Me”, “When You Were Young” and “Human” all charted higher.

The Killers’ first manager Braden Merrick suggested that the song’s theme of betrayal and anguish had a lot to do with how it connects so well with its audience: “You can hear the fragility in Brandon’s voice and the story was something that everyone could relate to,” he said.

“We’ve all been in s****y relationships and had our heart broken by somebody.”

Meanwhile, Gilbert claimed that it is simply “the best song of the past 20 years”, championing The Killers’ virtuoso performances and the era-defining nature of the song.

“It’s better than any song ever written,” he said. “You get bored of eight-out-of-10 songs. You don’t get bored of 11-out-of-10 songs.”