Open up your eager eyes: now THIS is "Mr Brightside"

I have come to the conclusion that Jacques Lu Cont's remix of The Killers' "Mr Brightside" is the single of the year. Forget the album version played on Top 40 radio or even the video, the impact of which is semi-obscured by Brandon Flowers' cute makeup and Robert Smith jones at its most "Inbetween Days" poptastic. Lu Cont goes for bombast, both stripping away the cluttered nuevo wavo cliches of the band's untoward guitar raunch and intensifying the desperation that was always lurking beneath the surface. Admittedly, a beguiling surface, and since the selling of surfaces has been part of rock and roll since the days of Bowie, it's the task of any half-decent producer to spit-shine that surface so that it doesn't just gleam, but reflect its creators' most addled vision of loveliness.

Anyway, the extra synths (which come in frosty puffs, like breath on glass), sequencers (evoking Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy"), programmed drums, and bottomless distance between Flowers and the instruments heighten the drama; it's melodrama, alright, but as lurid and heartbreaking as the best. Lu Cont forces us to concentrate on the lyrics, and damn good ones they are too. In the original version Flowers' patting himself on the back for being Mr Brightside is too hurried, the ironies pat; the irony's gone in Lu Cont's remix, and what's left is a rather devastating moment of phony self-assurance (think the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hanging On" remade/remodelled by Paul Van Dyk). It's all there in Flowers' vocal, and all praise to Lu Cont for directing our attention to it.