Let’s start with the contradiction at the heart of this band. It’s only a list of songs by one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands of all time! Along the way, I’ll try to answer the question about why this band has such strong hold on the people who love them.ĭon’t cry. This month is the 50th anniversary of Who’s Next, the band’s most successful studio LP, responsible for spawning radio classics like “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Behind Blue Eyes.” In recognition of this landmark, I am ranking my 50 favorite Who songs. But why? Together, we are going to try to figure this out.
I fell in love with The Who when I was 13, and I still love them now. “The Who don’t necessarily captivate the whole teenage generation - as each batch comes up every year - but we certainly hit a percentage of them, and we hold them.”Įven now, 41 years later, these words ring true. People who get into The Who when they’re 13, 14, 15, 16, never stop being fans,” The Who’s Pete Townshend once rhapsodized to the critic Greil Marcus in 1980. Add the soaring vocals of Flowers to the thumping drums and excitable synths that sound like they were picked up off the cutting room floor from a Pet Shop Boys studio session in the 80s and you’ve got yourself a stadium singalong smash.“But always, always, there is a very, very strong grab - a deep, instant grab - which lasts… forever. While the lyrics might not make a lot of sense they’re catchy as fuck. If you let the new wave guitars and evocative vocal runs wash over you then you’ll forget all about the other bloke driving your ex-girlfriend around the streets you used to frequent.Īny list of the best Killers songs that doesn’t include ‘Human’ is automatically null and void. Able to take a glass of piss and make it taste like orange juice, this was an early example of how good the Las Vegas four-piece are at disguising melancholy as euphoric bliss. As it is, the song aims for the stars with such belief and conviction not even the Boss himself would deny it status as a classic.Ī staple of the band’s live shows, ‘Smile Like You Mean It’ is an upbeat number with downbeat lyrics – but that’s something The Killers have always been good at. If the lead single from ‘Sam’s Town’ was any more heavily indebted to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ the authorities would have to get involved. “Somebody told me you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year,” goes the chorus, and the moral of the story, to paraphrase Damo circa ‘95, is that when boys look like girls they get the girls who like boys.
That couldn’t be further from the truth: listen again and watch as your heart swoons and soars.Ī decade after the gender deconstruction of Blur’s ‘Girls & Boys’, The Killers tapped into the same lyrical wellspring with this disco-fuelled celebration of androgyny. ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ doesn’t get the level of love its ‘Hot Fuss’ counterparts do, with the common consensus being that anyone who remembers more than the “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” bit probably has a Brandon Flowers face tattoo inked across their entire back. Where rattling guitars glide over a bed of gorgeous synths, it’s a mid-tempo gem that U2 are probably kicking themselves about because they didn’t write it first. Perfect for watching the sun set behind a festival stage, ‘Read My Mind’ is a dizzying cocktail of euphoria and melancholy that Flowers and co. Verse to pre-chorus, pre-chorus to chorus, it’s all magic, and as much as we love the payoff, the in-betweens are where it’s at. But just like both those movies, this song is stellar.Īside from being the only Killers song where Flowers plays bass, the unique thing about ‘For Reasons Unknown’ isn’t how or why it’s good, but where it’s good: ‘For Reasons Unknown’ might just be the only stadium indie banger in history that’s all about the transitions. While lyrically it plays up to its name, with Flowers detailing the time he was ripped from his bed by an extraterrestrial, the contrasting instrumentation, complete with hammering guitar chords and gleeful synths, are more Guardians of the Galaxy than Blade Runner. The first few seconds of ‘Spaceman’ lead you to believe that you’re about to be taken on a futuristic journey to a far away galaxy where Harrison Ford kicks back in his rocking chair waiting on his next robot-busting assignment.
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