‘Missing You’: The forgotten song Brandon Flowers calls his all-time favourite
Riding the wave of the garage rock revival in the early 2000s, The Killers debuted on the scene with Hot Fuss, an album that reimagined pop music and glam rock sensibilities.
With lyrics penned by singer Brandon Flowers, he wrote with a Las Vegas flair of debauchery, heartbreak, and nostalgia. Featuring the one and only ‘Mr Brightside’, a song that seemingly everyone can sing word-for-word by muscle memory, Hot Fuss dominated the charts and granted The Killers a devoted fanbase in the UK and beyond.
The band has a knack for crafting truly anthemic hits, ones that you can imagine reverberating off stadium walls and screamed along to at parties. Of course, ‘Mr Brightside’ is an inescapable classic, played at every festive event possible, and sure to get even the most reluctant listener up off their feet.
The now-iconic bassline of ‘Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine’, the infectious chorus of ‘Somebody Told Me’ (“That you had a boyfriend / Who looked like a girlfriend / That I had in February of last year…”), and the poignancy of Flowers’ pen on later hits such as ‘When You Were Young’ solidified The Killers’ as one of the groups keeping rock ‘n’ roll alive in the pop music landscape.
While going on to write a song like ‘Mr Brightside’, which has withstood generations, Flowers’ musical roots can be traced back to a John Waite song.
In conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Flowers curated the ‘soundtrack of his life’. The song that reminds him of home? The Eagles’ ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’. The first album he purchased with his own money? Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion. A Killers’ song he’d like to be remembered for? ‘A Dustland Fairytale’. Above all others, though, he credited ‘Missing You’ by Waite as being the first song he was obsessed with.
“I’m not sure how young kids get to the point where they’re memorising and knowing songs, but I knew the words to ‘Missing You’ from John Waite probably from when I was three years old,” he revealed.
Released in 1984, ‘Missing You’ has the signature slow tempo of a 1980s ballad, complete with lovelorn lyrics crooned by Waite, such as, “And there’s a storm that’s raging / Through my frozen heart tonight”.
The song has a wistful quality that those who have endured a similar sadness can find solace in, never mind the emotions of a three-year-old child. It is slightly comical to imagine a young Flowers singing along to Waite’s heartbreak, but nonetheless, he was struck by the song for reasons that even he still cannot quite comprehend.
“For whatever reason, that was the song that I gravitated toward when it was on the radio and I was driving around with my mom,” Flowers continued. “It must’ve been played a lot, because I knew all the words”.
From a young age, his love of the song earned him a sort of ‘old soul’ association, much to his family’s amusement. He remembers with a laugh, “My sister would take me around to her friends’ parents and things, and I would sing it”.
In hindsight, it is easy to hear how a song like ‘Missing You’ could influence on The Killers’ sound: they share a timelessness that resides sonically and lyrically. Whether you’re shouting or crying along to the lyrics, such songs hold an inexplicable resonance.
