There’s something funny to me about the fact that my favorite Suede song wasn’t actually written as a song, as such. “Killing of A Flash Boy,” according to Bernard Butler – credited as co-writer, with Brett Anderson, and released as the b-side to “We Are The Pigs” just after Butler had left the band – is actually made up on chunks of unfinished music he’d been playing with, sewn-together Frankenstein-style after the fact. And, when you know that, you can actually hear it: Listen to the abrupt change of the instrumentation at 0:43, or 2:08, for example; without the vocals to soften it, you’d wonder if someone had changed the song you were listening to, the edit is so abrupt.
And yet, the end result works. The tension between the glam strut of the opening (Those drums, clearing the way for the foreboding guitar riff!) and the chorus, which feels extravagant in contrast, indulgent in a way that makes sense for such a violent song – it’s showing off, in its way – before falling back to the riff and menace of the verse again; the urban psychedelia of the bridge (Anderson’s voice, flanged-to-shit: “So think of the sea, my baby/Think of the sea as you murder me…”). And also, maybe most of all, possibly my favorite Suede lyrics of all. There’s something appropriately lyrical and mean about an opening like “All the white kids shuffle/To the heavy metal stutter/And go/Shaking on the scene/Like a killing machine,” as well as the threat of “That shitter with a pout/Won’t be putting it about no more.” It’s one of the few times, for me, that Anderson managed to inhabit a character that felt real and not overly idealized, but still worked with a kind of poetry.