Rock icon confesses he ‘hated’ his band’s biggest single-Laura Harman-Entertainment – Metro

Kings of Leon front man has revealed he’s not a fan of one of their hit tunes(Picture: PA)

Kings of Leon front man, Caleb Followill, has revealed that he was not a fan of the band’s biggest hit, Sex on Fire.

Sex on Fire is the first single released on Kings of Leon’s fourth album, Only by the Night, which was met with huge success.

The song, released in August 2008 by the American rock band, went straight to number one on the UK singles chart, where it spent three weeks, ultimately spending 42 weeks on the chart in total.

It is now considered one of the top 100 best-selling songs in UK history, but it’s popularity with fans doesn’t mean its popular with the band itself.

In a new interview, Caleb, 42, spoke about the success of Kings of Leon and revealed why he didn’t originally want their hit tune on their fourth album.

‘Usually whatever the label likes I’m like, “Oh, I hate that.”  A lot of times they’re right and it ends up being successful.’

He explained that Sex on Fire was one of the songs he didn’t like.

‘I didn’t want it on the album. But I knew it was… I knew it had potential, but I felt like there were other songs… I knew instantly, “Everyone’s gonna hear this and they’re not gonna listen to the rest of [the album]”,’ he told NME this week.

Kings of Leon first formed in 1999 (Picture: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images)

In a previous interview with NME in 2008, the front man said that he was the one who first put the lyrics together, as a joke.

‘I just had this melody and I didn’t know what to say. Then one day I just sang “this sex is on fire” and I laughed. 

‘I thought it was terrible, but the rest of the band were like, ‘it’s good, it’s got a hook’. I was like “f*** off!” but I ended up writing it.’

The band consists of three brothers and their cousin (Picture: Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

Explaining the sexual themes in the song the Use Somebody singer added: ‘There’s an element of sex that’s expected in our songs so I tried to wrap it all up in one song. If you read the lyrics you’ll find it’s got some quite visual lyrics in it. 

‘It’s a pretty sexy song actually, but I knew after writing Sex On Fire, I couldn’t write verses about making out, or going to the movie theatre with a girl.’

The Followill relatives grew up in Tennessee and Oklahoma (Picture: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images)

Although he may not have enjoyed writing the song, it most certainly has been a huge hit, and the Closer singer has admitted he doesn’t know where they’d be without it.

He told NME in 2021: ‘There comes a point when you can either be proud of what you’ve accomplished or you can still sit back and be sour over it. 

‘My sour side was never because of the music itself, it was because I thought we should have gotten that kind of recognition earlier on in our career.’

He concluded: ‘When lighting strikes, it strikes. There’s no way you can recreate it or bottle it up. Without that album, who knows if we’d still be making records today.’

The Kings of Leon are set to the release their ninth album Can We Please Have Fun on May 10 and will perform at Hyde Park this summer.

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