“I never thought it would be a hit. It was too long for radio. So we lied about it. And it worked!”: How an ’80s classic got to No 1 - with a little bit of cheating…

Mr. Mister.

In 1985, rock band Mr. Mister had a problem. They knew that their ballad Broken Wings was a great song, but they also knew that no pop radio station in America was going to play a track that was almost six minutes long - especially from a band that nobody had ever heard of.

When they tried editing the track, cutting it down to a radio-friendly three minutes, they felt they had lost too much of what made the song so powerful.