Mr. Brightside

Keuning stumbled onto the riff in the closet he used as a vocal booth, before he met Flowers, and Flowers, then 19 or 20, wrote the words and chorus by hand. The song is about jealousy at the end of his first serious relationship: he told Q in 2009 that he went to the Crown and Anchor, a British-themed pub in Las Vegas, and found his girlfriend there with another man. It has a single verse, sung twice, because he had not written a second. Flowers said he was aiming for Iggy Pop's monotone on Sixteen, and Vannucci is credited with the opening drum beat. Of the first time they played it, in a drummer's living room, Flowers said he felt the hairs on his arm stand up.

The first demo was made in November 2001 at Kill the Messenger Studio in Henderson, Nevada, with Keuning on bass and Matt Norcross on drums, and later appeared on Direct Hits (2013). It ran nearly five minutes, part of the reason Warner passed. The master came from a 2003 session in Berkeley produced by Jeff Saltzman. Mark Needham's first mix took just over half an hour on an eight-input console with no automation, and Alan Moulder's later remix reportedly could not beat it. Lizard King released it in September 2003 and again in May 2004, when it reached ten in Britain. In America it entered the Hot 100 in February 2005 and climbed to ten that June.

Afterlife

It was the first song to log 260 weeks on the UK singles chart, has since passed 500, and in May 2024 overtook Oasis's Wonderwall as Britain's most successful song never to reach number one. Laura Barton tied its hold to pub singalongs, football terraces and congregational singing. It is the band's best-selling song in America and their most played live, 1,109 times by setlist.fm's count, from a Las Vegas coffee house in February 2002 to Glastonbury in 2019, where Johnny Marr joined them to close the set. Stuart Price remixed it as Jacques Lu Cont, and it has been covered by the MIT a cappella group Resonance, by Abi Sampa on The Voice UK and by Kelly Clarkson live.

Sophie Muller directed the US video in Los Angeles, a burlesque love triangle with Flowers, Izabella Miko and Eric Roberts, which won Best New Artist in a Video at the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards. The upload in the hypersongs web is that official US video, of the Hot Fuss recording.