Mr Brightside is now pop’s greatest ever near-miss
Las Vegas band’s drunken singalong classic overtakes Oasis’s Wonderwall as the best ‘not number one’ ever
THE KILLERS’ Mr Brightside has become the biggest-selling song in the UK top 100 charts never to have made it to number one.
The 2003 hit has usurped Wonderwall by Oasis: with 5.57 million combined sales and streams it is also now the UK’S third biggest song of all time, according to the Official Charts Company.
The Las Vegas band’s indie dancefloor classic also surpasses sales and streams by Wham!’s festive anthem, Last Christmas.
Mr Brightside has now spent 408 weeks, about seven years, in the UK top 100. Its closest competitor is Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved, which has a more modest 234 weeks in the top 100.
The song has 530.3 million streams – 100 paid streams or 600 free streams equal one “sale” – and has sold 1.1 million copies in the more than 20 years since its initial release.
Lead singer Brandon Flowers, who wrote the track with lead guitarist Dave Keuning, said he no longer feels like he is part of the song after its monumental success.
“It’s funny. I don’t feel so much of it anymore. It just exists in the world,” Flowers said. “It’s amazing I had something to do with it but I almost feel a little bit removed because it’s so big,” he told the Official Charts Company.
The enduring track is still being streamed 1.8 million times per week in the UK. And it shows no sign of slowing either, with last year representing the track’s biggest year of streams, with 79.97 million. In 2024, Mr Brightside is accelerating further still with average combined weekly sales and streams up 23 per cent year-on-year.
Dr Stephen Graham, head of arts and humanities at Goldsmiths University, believes its popularity is because the lyric and loud music are a “perfect fit” for the UK’S “boisterous” nightlife culture.
“UK nightlife culture was a perfect fit for Mr Brightside. Loud, boisterous nights out are de rigueur and uncomplicated songs that can be sung without much skill or concentration that carry you along like a massive, joyous crowd have always been a hit here,” he said.
“Mr Brightside has all of those, and so really lends itself to settings where groups of people, many of them drunk, are looking for ... collective joy.”
The song’s biggest week to date in the UK was July 2019, when it clocked up 17,700 chart units following the band’s headline Glastonbury set.
Mr Brightside’s biggest year of pure sales was 2012 when it was bought and downloaded 125,200 times.
Flower’s first indication of the song’s impact was ahead of their 2004 Glastonbury performance. “We played that song [and] something had obviously happened … something shifted in the way that the audience physically responded and it set us off on this path to become the live band that we are now.”
Martin Talbot, chief executive of Official Charts, commented: “The success of Mr Brightside is a triumph of extraordinary longevity, it is a song which has lived with so many of us throughout the recent decades of our lives – and, for some, an entire lifetime.
“Ed Sheeran is absolutely right to describe it as the UK’S alternative national anthem. And for this reason, among many others, it is a huge honour for us to have been able to present Brandon Flowers with one of our brand new Top 10 Awards in tribute to its legacy and impact.
“Twenty years on, it is now the top 10 hit that all others only aspire to be.”