No one listens to the radio anymore, according to music business conventional wisdom, anyway. Of course, this isn’t true – people are just listening to hundreds of different stations at the same time. The mass audience that existed until relatively recently is pretty much gone forever, at least in North America.

In Europe this hasn’t quite happened; not yet, anyway. There are still radio stations and shows that command massive audiences. A song can still break on the radio and propel a band into the stratosphere overnight.

One of my favourite examples of this from the past few years is the band Franz Ferdinand. Scotts, they hail from the UK art school scene that seems to produce so many good bands. The first time I heard ‘Take Me Out’ I loved it. Dirty guitars, just distorted enough to be cool, a sneering, detached vocal, loose and tight at the same time, it has all my archetypes. Great club lyrics, too:

I say, don’t you know?
You say, you don’t know
I say, take me out.

Somehow they perfectly capture a moment many people have had – an escalating romantic tiff, performed in public, with just enough alcohol involved to make it truly irrational. It has all the ludicrous gravity of such moments. The next day one wonders ‘what in the hell was that all about?’ but neither party is sure any more. All that’s left is the (again, irrational) conviction that one was in the right. Somehow Franz Ferdinand nailed it.

The song also has another feature that endears it to the producer in me. The first half consists of a lengthy intro, which has a different tempo, groove, melody - everything. When they decide it is time to get to the real deal, the band somehow slows down and switches gear, to finally lurch into the songs trademark riff. Every band who has tried to switch gears for a studio bed track knows just how hard it is. Slowing down (and making it sound deliberate) is infinitely harder than speeding up. My hat goes off to them.

I can feel my credibility draining away like bathwater, but the Killers have been on my top ten Ipod shuffle list for a while. I would say that I didn’t really get disco stuff like “Mr. Brightside”, and I thought the whole vibe was a little too retro to be true.

Then I caught this song on the local FM station the other day, and it stuck. ‘When You Were Young’ has something that too few songs enjoy these days – a serious devotion to the art of songwriting. The prevalence of loops and the dominance of the bass hook has boxed in a lot of pop songs. The Killers write a lot of their songs on keyboards, and you can hear the difference. Piano players don’t think in the blues patterns that dominate rock and roll guitarists, and it makes their songwriting more intriguing. There is a good reason Elton John and Freddie Mercury wrote such interesting stuff, at least in their early days.  Brandon Flowers writes big choruses, full of grandiose melodic leaps. The guitars are there, but they are forced by the different musical structure required by a keyboard into more unpredictable places.

Lyrically this song is interesting. Writer Flowers is counseling a girl, maybe his own? – you are never quite sure. He is trying to convince her that her childhood fantasy of love doesn’t exist – there is no one out there who “looks like Jesus”. It is an interesting idea; maybe he is really talking about the complications of his own faith, or that of someone close to him.

Either way, it is pretty heady stuff for a pop song. It’s not easy to be catchy and serious at the same time. If nothing else, I like their audacity. Picking through the contradictions of your own faith in front of millions is the sort of thing only a Bono can pull off. The Killers are to be admired for their nerve.

And it sure sounds good on the radio.