Category: Black Box Recorder

Album: The Facts of Life – Black Box Recorder
Review: NME, 27 April 2000
Author: Jim Alexander

Those facts seem to be as follows – relationships fail, dreams are usually shattered, sex is frequently bad and, if the cover is anything to go by, we are all slabs of meat liable to a few sharp cuts from Black Box Recorder‘s lyrical butcher’s knife. Strangely then, two years after Haines, Nixey and Moore released the scabrous ‘England Made Me’, this has been vaunted as their upbeat album.

It is in part. Because if that debut was defined by the subjects Luke Haines chose to turn his withering eye on, then ‘The Facts Of Life’ is no different. And while Sarah Nixey might still sound as if the daily Stepford wife dose of gin and Valium holds little relief, the shocking news is that Black Box Recorder seem to have cheered up a little.

‘Sex Life’ revels in salacious squelches, ‘Straight Life’ seemingly celebrates happily-married, DIY-enthusiast normality, and even redemption appears on offer as ‘French Rock’n’Roll’ sees a suicidal woman saved from the high-rise belly flop by the power of music. In suitably impenetrable style, however, you can never be totally sure they haven’t got a sneer playing on the corner of their lips.

Especially as elsewhere that clipped, dispassionate vocal is turned upon more familiar terrain. Like the road network as perfect metaphor for disintegrating relationships (‘The English Motorway System’), the drowning of two young Victorians (‘The Deverell Twins’), the innocence of a first kiss dissolving in imagined blood (‘May Queen’), or the closing ‘Goodnight Kiss’ which tours the English fringes and another cancerous relationship and asks –“will the last one to leave turn out the lights” -. It sounds not so much like the end of an affair as an elegy for an entire nation.

If the lyrics have moved on in shades – dark ones naturally – then the music has made several leaps since the spectral atmospherics of their debut. Much has already been made of the title track’s resemblance to All Saints‘ ‘Never Ever’ and Billie’s ‘Honey To The Bee’, but that’s just the start of it. Sugaring the pill to make the lyrical bad medicine slip down all the easier, this is rigged with soulful flourishes, the tinkle of glockenspiel, gently-looped R&B; beats, and the sound of Air hanging out with Pulp to make satin-smooth subliminal pop. Catchy, intelligent and frequently heartbreakingly poignant, it proves saccharine is no bar to excellence.

With ambition matched by achievement, Black Box Recorder’s outlook might be superficially sunnier, but the clouds of their bile still linger on the horizon. Setting about infiltrating the mainstream, Luke Haines and John Moore don’t just want the converted to acknowledge their evil genius, this time they want to inflict it on everyone.

JC adds…….

All too often, the reviewers in the NME disappear up their own backsides as they attempt to be way too smart and knowing when they offer up views and opinions on singles and albums.  Not in this instance – this more or less captures what the group was all about – the summary of Air/Pulp and smooth subliminal pop is so accurate.

mp3: Black Box Recorder – The English Motorway System
mp3: Black Box Recorder – Sex Life
mp3: Black Box Recorder – French Rock’n’Roll
mp3: Black Box Recorder – Goodnight Kiss

This is a sidebar to the current Sunday series that is looking at the singular life of Luke Haines. I did promise that I wouldn’t feature any of the Black Box Recorder singles on the basis that he was part of a collective within that group rather than the main focus of attention….however, re-reading Post-Modern, his second volume of memoirs which covers the period in which BBR were to the fore, reminded me of a great tale that has to be shared, if nothing else to show up how messed-up the music industry was at the tail end of the last century.

The Auteurs had, to all intent and purposes broken up, albeit not quite as a final album would later emerge (something which will be covered in the Sunday series). Luke Haines was at a loose end and bored, and when that happens, he gets himself into mischief. This time round he found two partners in crime in the shape of John Moore (a one-time member of the Jesus and Mary Chain whose current speciality was playing a saw in a 20-strong indie-folk band) and Sarah Nixey, a sultry backing vocalist with the same band for whom Haines would occasionally play glockenspiel. The trio decided to form Black Box Recorder whose debut album, which eventually came out on Chyrsalis Records, was made thanks to five different record labels providing them with sums of £1,000-£1,500 to record demos.

England Made Me, was released in July 1998. It’s lead-off single is Child Psychology but receives no radio play thanks to it having a chorus of ‘Life is Unfair….Kill Yourself or Get Over It’. The follow-up single is the title track of the album, but it too fails to come close to the charts.

The record label bosses feel that the band’s cover of the reggae track Uptown Top Ranking, a huge hit for Althea & Donna in 1977, should be the next single as a further push to improve sales of the album.

mp3 : Althea & Donna – Up Town Top Ranking

Somehow, Luke Haines and his manager persuade the label to cough-up a further £1,000 as a ‘reggae reserach budget’ in advance of the album version being re-recorded for release as a single, a budget which is spent partly on buying reggae singles and albums but mostly on sustaining a rock’n’roll lifestyle.

The fact that the record label thought the cover was worthy of release as a single was just insane. Here’s Luke Haines to explain:-

‘Uptown Top Ranking’ is, in its original form, a thing of true joy as any child of the 70s will attest to. By the time BBR finish with the song it sounds like it’s been fucked with elephant tranquilliser. Any notion of dreadlocks has been replaced by dread.

The cover version started off as an afterthought during the England Made Me sessions; whilst producer Phil Vinall is mixing an album track, we go off and commandeer a little eight-track recorder. The entire song is constructed in the studio vocal booth. John Moore has brought in a sample of an old recording by rum 70s suave man actor Peter Wyngarde. The Wyngarde sample is from a song called ‘Rape’ (a rakish comedy skit on sexual assault). The Wyngarde monstrosity goes into the sampler and we slow it way, way down until we hit negative equity.

Next up is ‘The Turn’. Sarah Nixey doesn’t know Althea and Donna’s original which is perfect; she is also magnificently hungover. Again, perfect. We write out the lyrics – mainly Jamaican patois which we cannot make out – phonetically, and she reads them out into the microphone in one take, with the enthusiasm of a cash and carry shelf stacker. If schoolgirls won’t sing along with our songs on the top deck of the bus, then we will make records that sound as if they’ve been made by a schoolgirl on the bus – a schoolgirl from The Village of The Damned of course. Bung on a bit of bass – lemme wind out me waist – press record, and catch a few incongruous whoops from Moore, and the track is finished in an hour or so.

mp3 : Black Box Recorder – Up Town Top Ranking

Six months later and the trio find themselves in On-U Sound to do the remix. In Haines’s words, a studio where you could record a brass band from Grimsby and it would come out sounding like Augustus Pablo. After a few hours of mucking around, they have something which to Haines’s ears sounds pretty much the same as it did when they first recorded it,  and they hand it over to the record company:-

mp3 : Black Box Recorder – Up Town Top Ranking (remix)

A few days later word comes back that Chrysalis will not be releasing a third BBR single nor will they be contracting a second BBR album. But, as a way of saying sorry for this turn of events, the label offers some more money for further demos so that BBR can try to find a new home at an alternative label. In due course they do, and the second album and one of its singles turn out to be hits.

As I said, the music industry was particularly messed up at the time….bloated with cash from the short-lived boom in CD sales as many abandoned vinyl and bought replacements via the shiny silver discs.  There will be many more similar but untold stories out there……

JC

 A GUEST POSTING by ROL

from My Top Ten

1. Child Psychology

I still remember picking this one out of the new releases pile back when I worked in the radio station record library. We were always on the look-out for new music to play on our Sunday night indie & alternative show: the only time of the week we actually got to break free from the safety of the playlist.

I fell in love with Child Psychology on first listen. It’s dark, it’s wickedly funny, and it has Sarah Nixey whispering Luke Haines’ twisted lyrics. And then comes the chorus…

Life is unkind
Kill yourself or get over it.

I can honestly say I’d never heard anything like this before and it blew me away. It spoke to me personally. My 20s weren’t the best of times. Yes, there were lots of gigs and free records, but a lot of loneliness and heartache too. I was jaded, cynical and world-weary. This song could have been written for me.

According to iffypedia, Child Psychology was banned by UK radio except XFM. Well, excuse me, iffypedia, but we gave it a few spins on a Sunday evening… when we knew the boss wasn’t listening because he hated guitar music. In the US, the song was released just after the Columbine massacre, so the chorus lines were played backwards. Was that ironic, given the history of supposed backwards suicide messages hidden in pop songs… or did someone in the record company seriously think that was a logical solution?

2. Girl Singing In The Wreckage

There were two b-sides to Child Psychology, and both worked to complement the main track. Girl Singing In The Wreckage was also the opening track of the debut BBR album England Made Me. I don’t know if it was meant as such, but it feels like a sequel to Child Psychology, with the female narrator growing up and tackling the metaphorical car crash of teenage ennui.

(The third track on the CD single was a cover of Jacques Brel’s gloriously tragic suicide anthem Seasons In The Sun, originally a hit for Terry Jacks back in 1973. Once you’ve heard Ms. Nixey’s take, you’re liable to ask, “Terry who?”)

3. The Facts Of Life

Although the BBR songwriting chores were shared between Luke Haines (who, I’d guess, had more hand in the lyrics) and former Jesus & Mary Chain drummer John Moore, the band’s greatest asset was arguably Sarah Nixey.

I find it difficult to write about Ms. Nixey objectively without coming across as an old letch… but the best way to describe her would be in twisted comparison to Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell. Imagine a cartoon where a lovelorn young bloke has a pure, perfect, sweet-voiced angel dressed in white sitting on his right shoulder, encouraging him to be good and kind and virtuous. That would be the Sarah Cracknell angel. On the other shoulder, however, would be Sarah Nixey, dressed in black, also sweet-voiced… but that’s where the comparison ends. Now imagine that second angel was the teacher in your Sex Ed class…

Welcome to The Facts Of Life, a single which took Luke Haines into the top 20 for the first and only time in his career. If you’d asked me before I started compiling this ICA, I’d have told you this song must have been Top 10, probably Top 3… I mean, surely this was one of the biggest hits of the year 2000? It was in my head, anyway. In reality, it scraped #20 for a week then disappeared from the chart forever. A true sign of quality.

4. Andrew Ridgely

Another of Luke Haines’ ode to the 80s, and to the underdogs. The song begins with Nixey saying, “I never liked George Michael much… although they say he was the talented one”, before confessing a secret passion for the forgotten half of Wham!

This is a song about everything that was wrong with the 80s – plastic synthesizers and “Loadsamoney!” capitalism – yet Haines manages to make it sound not so bad really. Certainly, by today’s standards, most of us could probably find time for a little 80s nostalgia.

5. Keep It In The Family

After their third album, Passionoia, in 2003, BBR went “on hiatus”. Nixey and Moore were married by this point but split up in 2006. Then, a couple of years later, the band turned up again with a surprise gig in London. Plans were afoot for a new album and two tracks were recorded, but nothing else materialised and in 2010 Keep It In The Family and Do You Believe In God? were released online as The Final Statement. What might have been…

Side B

1. The School Song

A blatant attempt to recapture the success of The Facts Of Life, pitching Nixey as the sarky, sexy school marm telling us to wipe that idiotic smile off our faces and not to run in the corridor. Well, it worked for me. I never ran in the corridor again. Typically iconoclastic Hainesy chorus too…

Welcome to the school of song
It’ll help you achieve perfection
Destroy your record collection
It’s for your own protection

2. England Made Me

The story of a very English psychopath and the country that made him… or her. At this point, it’s difficult to distinguish between Haines’ lyrics and Nixey’s performance. Her angelic vocals were the perfect mouthpiece for his darkest fantasies…

I had a dream last night that I was drunk,
I killed a stranger and left him in a trunk,
At Brighton railway station,
It was an unsolved case,
A famous murder mystery,
People love a mystery.

3. The English Motorway System

American highways are full of romanticism… British motorways are dark and dreary in comparison. Trying to make a successful British driving song is hard work, but this is up there with It’s Immaterial’s Driving Away From Home and Billy Bragg’s A13 Trunk Road To The Sea in my mind. It’s about the end of a relationship, obviously… but even that can be beautiful and strange in the right hands.

4. Sex Life

Find me a better song about young men who see sex everywhere but don’t know how to get it. In your dreams!

5. The Art Of Driving

The song that rolls all Black Box Recorder’s obsessions into one delicious confection. Sex. Teachers. Driving. Seduction. Englishness. Innuendo. More sex. Car crashes. Death. What else do you want from a pop song?

ROL

JC adds…..here’s the fabulous Top of the Pops appearance to enjoy:-

 

Black Box Recorder consisted of Sarah Nixey, Luke Haines (of The Auteurs), and John Moore (formerly of The Jesus and Mary Chain).

Debut LP, England Made Me, got a fair bit of critical acclaim upon its release in 1998 but didn’t sell all that well, perhaps because it was a very downbeat take on the struggles of everyday life where the gap between the haves and have-nots was ever-increasing and life for many seemed to be mundane and not worth bothering about.

By 2000, the band had come to the conclusion that sex sells, and so while the music itself on the follow-up LP The Facts of Life was little different from the debut, many of the lyrics were a bitter commentary on the peculiar attitude us Brits – or more precisely the demograph referred to as Middle England – have to sex and pornography.

The band enjoyed a Top 20 hit single with the lead track off the LP and as follow-up they selected LP opener The Art of Driving, a song which is not really so much about moving a motor vehicle from point A to point B as ironic advice on how best to ensure a developing relationship goes along at the right pace.

There was little radio play for the single and it stalled at #53.  Black Box Recorder never threatened the charts again.

I thought I’d feature the single as the 2 x CDs made up a great little package.  You got a radio edit of the track, the album version and you could also access the promo video.  There were also two cover versions of hit singles from the 70s, both of them delivered in ways that would make you believe they were Black Box Recorder originals.

And then there was a very interesting, funny and occasionally perverted remix of the band’s hit single – a remix by the Chocolate Layers, aka Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey of Pulp.

mp3 : Black Box Recorder – The Art of Driving (radio edit)
mp3 : Black Box Recorder – The Facts of Life (remixed by the Chocolate Layers)
mp3 : Black Box Recorder – Rock’n’Roll Suicide
mp3 : Black Box Recorder – The Art of Driving (album version)
mp3 : Black Box Recorder – Uptown Top Ranking

Not long after this, Nixey and Moore got married and had a child, much to the chagrin of Haines.  His bitter take on how it affected him and the band can be enjoyed within the pages of his second volume of memoirs, Post Everything.