The same verse twice, because the second one was not written yet
A synth stabs, a guitar answers in a bright panic, and Brandon Flowers starts already out of the cage, doing just fine, which is how you know he is not. Mr. Brightside repeats its first verse as its second. There was no second verse. He sang the same words again when the demo reached the turn, and the repeat turned out to be the form: jealousy with nowhere new to go, a film playing behind the eyes, a kiss that became a scene he was not in. The drums sprint. The vocal sprints harder. Nothing in the track offers the relief of a bridge that explains. The explanation is the sprint.
He wrote the words at the end of 2001, nineteen or twenty, in a room he rented from his sister in Las Vegas for two hundred dollars a month, on a child’s bed, with a pen, because phones did not yet keep the notes. Dave Keuning had the riff on a cassette of ideas. Flowers put a chorus on it. The scene was the Crown and Anchor. He told Q in 2009 that he had been asleep and knew something was wrong, that he had instincts, that he went to the pub and his girlfriend was there with another guy. The wounds were fresh. He told NME he was Mr. Brightside, and that the emotions were real, which is why the song persisted. They recorded the version the world knows quickly, with Jeff Saltzman, close enough to the demo that Flowers still remembers the hairs on his arm. Hot Fuss appeared in 2004. Before that, he and Keuning had heard the Strokes’ Is This It in a car outside a Virgin Megastore and thrown away almost everything else they had written. This one survived the purge.
The video made the jealousy a cabaret, Flowers in eyeliner, the affair staged as theatre, which suited a lyric that already said it was all in his head and then refused to let the head be only imagination. On stage the song became the moment the room sings louder than the band. He has described that lift as tapping into something that does not need him once it starts. Britain, especially, would not let it leave the charts. A single from a Las Vegas bar band became furniture, weddings, last orders, a jealousy so specific it turned general.
I was asleep and I knew something was wrong. I have these instincts. I went to the Crown and Anchor and my girlfriend was there with another guy.
(Brandon Flowers, Q, 2009)
The identical verses are the craft accident that proved the feeling. A finished writer would have varied the picture. An unfinished one told the truth twice, because the picture had not changed between the kiss and the end. Keuning’s riff keeps the brightness in the title from becoming a smile. Brightside, here, is the man who will not look away, not the man who has recovered. Flowers has called the song cathartic and asked, with a laugh, who would have thought betrayal would sound this good. The laugh is allowed. The betrayal is still the engine.
What remains is the pub door. Mr. Brightside can be shouted by people who have never been to the Crown and Anchor, and it still belongs to the walk from a child’s bed to that door. The second verse is the first verse because the night did not provide a new one. The band kept the lack. The lack is why it still feels unfinished in the only way that matters.
