The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Mr Brightside becomes UK’s top selling song never to reach No 1
Iconic 2003 track Mr Brightside by the Killers has usurped Wonderwall by Oasis as the longestrunning song in the UK top 100 chart without ever actually claiming the No 1 spot.
According to the Official Charts Company, Mr Brightside’s 5.57 million combined sales and streams also makes it the UK’s third biggest song of all time.
Elton John’s Candle in the Wind ’97/ Something About The Way You Look Tonight and Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas remain No 1 and No 2, respectively.
Mr Brightside has a total of 530.3m streams – 100 paid streams or 600 free streams equal one “sale” – and has sold 1.1m copies since its initial release over 20 years ago.
The song has spent 408 weeks – seven years – in the UK top 100.
Its closest competitor is Lewis Capaldi’s Someone
You Loved, which trails behind at 234 weeks in the top 100.
Brandon Flowers, who wrote the iconic track with bandmate Dave Keuning, told the Official Charts Company that he now feels like the song is not even theirs.
“It’s funny. I don’t feel so much of it anymore. It just exists in the world,” Flowers 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 enduring track is still being streamed 1.8 million times per week by Britons.
There is no sign of it slowing, either, with last year representing the track’s biggest year of streams, with 79.97 million plays.
In 2024, Mr Brightside is accelerating further still with average combined weekly sales and streams up 23% year-on-year.
On his first indication of the song’s impact, 42-yearold Flowers said: “The John Peel stage at Glastonbury (in 2004).
“We’d been coming to the UK and had some great experiences, but we’d been away for a little while. We came back, and when we played that song something had happened. A change had 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.”