Mr. Mister – Kyrie

Thirty Million People Were Singing A Prayer — And Most Of Them Had No Idea

When Mr. Mister performed at the American Music Awards in January 1986, Richard Page looked up from the stage and spotted Stevie Wonder in the front row. Wonder was dancing. He was also mouthing every word — including “Kyrie eleison,” the two-thousand-year-old Greek liturgical phrase that millions of pop radio listeners had been mishearing as “carry a laser” since the single dropped the previous Christmas. It was a perfectly 1980s moment: one of music’s greatest ears, recognising something real inside a song the world was treating as a synth-pop hit.

Released in December 1985, “Kyrie” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 1, 1986, holding the position for two weeks — simultaneously sending the album Welcome to the Real World to number one on the same day, the first time an RCA act had topped the album chart in over a decade. It also reached number one on the Mainstream Rock chart, number three Adult Contemporary, and number eleven in the UK. The band had two consecutive number ones from the same album — “Broken Wings” and “Kyrie” — a feat that only a handful of acts managed in the entire decade.

The song was born on a tour bus during Mr. Mister’s opening slot for Adam Ant in 1984. Page and keyboardist Steve George built the music and handed it to John Lang — Page’s cousin, a Phoenix-raised lyricist who couldn’t sing or play an instrument but wrote every word on every Mr. Mister album. Lang had grown up in an Episcopal church where “Kyrie eleison” — Greek for “Lord, have mercy” — was part of the weekly service. He heard the melody and immediately wrote toward it. Page resisted. “I figured we’d be pigeonholed as a Christian band,” he said, “and I didn’t think that’s what we needed at the time.” Lang kept pushing. By the time they had finished recording, Page admitted there was no turning back. The myth that Page wrote the song from a hospital bed after being attacked is entirely false — it was Lang who was assaulted, three years earlier, and he has been clear it had nothing to do with the song.

The recording sessions at Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood — co-produced with Paul De Villiers, whom the band tracked down while he was mixing concert sound for Yes in Irvine — involved a notable piece of creative deception. The song ran long, just as “Broken Wings” had. Rather than cut it, the band stripped everything away for an a cappella ending that disguised the runtime. They had pulled the same trick on “Broken Wings” — simply writing a shorter time on the box label. Radio played it regardless. Pat Mastelotto worked out his entire drum arrangement alone in his room at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco on a day off, on a Linn Drum machine, with nothing but a cassette and a good pair of headphones.

Welcome to the Real World eventually sold over ten million copies worldwide and gave Mr. Mister the commercial peak they had spent three years building toward — including the period when Page had turned down lead singer roles in both Toto and Chicago to keep the band alive. The follow-up album Go On… stalled at number 55, and a fourth album completed in 1990 was shelved by RCA without release, effectively ending the band. Page eventually released it himself in 2010.

The song found fresh audiences wherever it landed — Miami Vice, The Goldbergs, GLOW — each placement introducing it to rooms that had never heard it the first time. In September 2025, all four original members reunited at drummer Pat Mastelotto’s 70th birthday at his home studio and recorded a version that was released on Christmas Day — forty years, almost to the week, after the single first appeared.

Page reflected on the song’s endurance with characteristic precision: “There’s a lot of power in those words. The song is a prayer, basically.” A prayer disguised as a pop record, broadcast from a tour bus on the Adam Ant circuit, was still being sung forty years later by people who thought they were asking for a laser. John Lang got exactly what he wanted. So did everyone else.