How The Strokes inspired The Killers’ ‘Mr. Brightside’
The explosion of American indie rock in the early 2000s revitalised a genre that was being left for dead at the end of the 1990s. As boy bands, rappers, and pop stars flooded the airwaves, bands from around the New York City area were bubbling under the nose of the mainstream, ready to bring guitars and punk energy back. Nobody embodied that excitement better than The Strokes, and their influence made it all the way over to Las Vegas, where The Killers were just beginning to form.
Although they would later poke fun at the explosion with their 2004 song ‘Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll’, The Killers were more than happy to point to The Strokes as an important influence. For lead singer Brandon Flowers, hearing the band’s 2001 debut Is This It helped shape the path for The Killers’ most famous song, ‘Mr. Brightside’.
“We must’ve written it around the end of 2001. Dave and I were writing a ton of songs at the time, trying to figure out what it was that made us tick,” Flowers recalled to NME in 2012. “I remember us going into the Virgin Megastore to buy (The Strokes’) Is This It on the day it came out, and when we put it on in the car, that record just sounded so perfect. I got so depressed after that we threw away everything, and the only song that made the cut and remained was ‘Mr. Brightside’.”
“It came from this cassette of ideas that Dave gave me, and one of them was the ‘Mr. Brightside’ riff,” Flowers added. “I was able to slap a chorus and some lyrics onto it, and I knew I liked it. But it wasn’t until we first tried it out with a drummer that I knew it was special. We went to the guy’s house and showed him the song, and I got the goosebumps after that.”
“Lyrically, it’s about an odd girlfriend of mine,” Flowers also said. “All the emotions in the song are real. 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. And that goes all the way down to the production; we recorded it in a couple of hours, but it just sounds right, you know?”
In a somewhat ironic twist, ‘Mr. Brightside’ has largely eclipsed the popularity of the band that helped inspire it. While it was never a chart-topper, ‘Mr. Brightside’ has become the longest-charting single in the history of the UK Singles Chart. It currently has nearly 2billion streams on Spotify, whereas The Strokes’ most popular track, ‘Last Nite’, only has around 500million. The Killers might not have existed without The Strokes, but once ‘Mr. Brightside’ hit, it was clear that The Killers weren’t in anyone’s shadow.
Check out ‘Mr. Brightside’ down below.
