BLACK BOX RECORDER
- a biography.

Black Box Recorder are an enigma. A threepiece comprising the haunting and fragile-voiced Sarah Nixey, Auteurs henchman Luke Haines and chief Idler and Absinth importer John Moore, they appeared fully formed at the start of 1998 with a debut of such startling originality that as soon as anyone heard it they had to tell someone else about it. "England Made Me" was more of an accusation than a boast, 37 minutes of glorious bleakness and eleven songs that told of an England that we very rarely read about but which we're surely all aware of. Haines said at the time that you should buy this record to understand the mood of the moment in Britain. The band pride themselves on the fact that they started recording it on the day Labour came to power and so they should: it is apt that this "euphoric" moment should be tempered with reality. Black Box Recorder deal with many things - love, sex, suicide, death (is there anything else?) - but above all they deal with realities. The characters who people their songs are dysfunctional and insane and therefore just like you and I. Welcome to reality.

"England Made Me" painted some pretty brutish landscapes - blighted single motherhood ("New Baby Boom"), family dysfunction ("Ideal Home") and terminal ennui ("It's Only The End Of The World") - but at least we knew someone cared. The band's first single "Child Psychology", was banned from national radio because it contained the chorus "Life is unfair/Kill yourself or get over it" as if we were all going to start chucking ourselves off Beachy Head the minute we heard it. (The irony is of course that this song could simply have been about the easily acquired angst veneer of bands like Radiohead - was this the first anti-Britpop record?). Whereas, as everyone knows, the only thing guaranteed to make you chuck yourself off Beachy Head is hearing some vacuous banter between two "zany" Radio One DJs. Of course, Black Box Recorder managed to skirt around their lack of airplay problem by making a video featuring a child under water. I bet they thought: "That'll show 'em."

"England Made Me" confirmed Haines and Moore as two of the best British songwriters of the decade. It used to be said that Haines was the only man who could sing with a sneer - well, now he and Moore just write with one instead. Together they create an idyllic musical backdrop for Nixey's fragile Jane Birkin-esque Queen's English voice which, if you listen, spits out the most horrendous tales of death and despair. It is pure subliminal silent subversion. Indeed the pair have said: "We like the idea of writing songs for disturbing, disturbed people and getting our friends to sing them." I believe it is Black Box Recorder's intention to sound so monumentally normal that they will frighten the life out of you and in Nixey they have the perfect mouthpiece - here is someone who manages to pull off the impossible feat of sounding like she's in a state of hysterical boredom, like a demented Stepford Wife, bored by privilege, spouting poisonous nursery rhymes. You cannot take your eyes off her for a second.

Well, two years on and I hope you haven't (taken your eyes off her, I mean) for we've now got "The Facts Of Life". If you've ever wondered what these were but were too afraid to ask, be afraid no longer for here are eleven songs (again) of such incandescent beauty it could almost make you .....smile. There are similar themes at play - adolescent disillusionment with a sterile adult world, despair at one's grown-up plight - but this is no concept album. Instead this just tells it how it is and this time we are not in England but on Earth.

The LP kicks off with "The Art Of Driving" which sets the mood perfectly and introduces one of the album's main themes - motion. Nixey and Moore hold a conversation as the car becomes a metaphor for the protagonists' relationship. It has a wonderful echo-ing drumbeat and a marvellous allegory about the accelerator pedal being man's best friend. "Weekend" (which follows as they tend to) regales the tale of another lost weekend when too much has been drunk and too much money spent (on conversation). It's chorus is so impossibly catchy ("Friday night/Saturday morning") you'll catch yourself singing it in the mornings - that's if you've got time to fit it in between renditions of the album's next track, mind you, because "The English Motorway" is possibly Black Box Recorder's finest hour. All Vienna drumbeats andTwin Peaks atmospherics this is the ultimate metaphor for a broken down relationship. Nixey entones in her most perfect, sweet and deadpan voice that "there are things we need to talk about" and asks demurely "do you really want to break up?" One can't help conjuring up images of the the nation's couples heading off up the motorway to salvage what they can, only to be confronted by exit signs, black ice, freezing fog and a hundred different reasons why they should never have got on the motorway in the first place. If ever a song was "beautiful and strange" this is it.

We're back on familiar ground on "May Queen" where we witness two children attempting their first kiss in the playground after school. Of course this is BBR's world and one child would like the other to write their name in blood across their shirt and cross their heart and hope to die. Nice. In "Sex Life" we appear to have grown up but "boys don't stop being boys". Set to a Wire/Colin Newman-esque backdrop this features some incredibly sexy lyrics - "Girl on girl/In your dreams/Girls on top/In between/ Girls together/ Girls alone/In your dreams/In your dreams/Boy on boy/Boys on top/Boys together/Boys don't stop/Being boys/In your dreams/In your dreams" and another chorus you won't stop singing "I've been thinking about you/In your dreams". The synthesized glockenspiel could be provided by Ryuchi Sakamoto and Air would die to have written this song. When it's over we get "French Rock 'N' Roll" (incidentally la haine means "hatred" in French) which seems to be about a woman just about to kill herself by jumping off a ledge (good job she didn't hear "Child Psychology" on the radio then) when she hears the most beautiful sound and pulls back from the edge. You should be able to guess how this goes - something like this "la la la la la la la la." Indeed: "Ouvrez la fenetre/Regardez les chansonniers/ Ecoutez la musique/C'est parfaite" says it all really. "The Facts Of Life", the album's title track, comes up next and features Nixey matter of factly reading out a list of things and how they stand. It sounds exactly like a pop record should and is about growing up and being rejected and getting on with life. It's an existentialist wonderland really and all the more so because there's no escape - even when we deal with the fear of being rejected "the boy who's listening to this song is probably saying that it's easier said than done". It's naturally the first single (it would have been illegal not to release it) and could provide BBR with their first hit."Straight Life" follows which is kind of like The Jam's Mr Clean in sentiment but this is BBR and we're dealing with some very fine subtlety - so much so that you find yourself wondering if somehow BBR don't crave normality. You could bet your bottom euro that an alien (or a yank) recently arrived from another planet would find it hard to detect any sarcasm in here. Which makes it the ultimate BBR song - impenetrable. "Gift Horse" follows and shows that BBR do have a heart after all - except they have one that appears to be broken. It tells us that we never know when we're well off and when it will all end and that we all of us want to grow up and old together. It's comforting to know they just want to be loved like the rest of us though quite why "they're digging up human remains in Notting Hill" remains to be seen. (Will you ask them? - I'm too chickenshit.) After this we get "The Deverell Twins" which is sung in the style of Emily Bronte (you didn't know she could sing, did you?) yet has a subject matter as dark as anything Ian McEwan has ever dreamt up. The Deverell Twins were two very young children who drowned in the Thames during Victorian times but appear to have kidnapped and hypnotised the singer of Black Box Recorder more than a century later. Nixey sounds at her dreamy best as she breathes seductively "I'm invited by the Deverell Twins/I'm delighted to accept their hospitality."

The LP closes with "Goodnight Kiss" which could only ever close an LP really. Two lovers plan a night out and where to go (the motorway's out of the running by this time, I guess) and just as you thought "England Made Me" had broken the bank by nameckecking English towns and places this one comes in with Blackpool Tower, Brighton Beach, the Severn Bridge. Southend-On-Sea, Morecambe Bay, Dungeness and The Isle Of Wight all in one go. The line "Will the last one to leave turn out the lights" could easily have appeared on "England Made Me" with its subtle allusion to The Sun's famous headline when Labour were in danger of getting elected except it feels more at home here: who is going to be the last one to turn out the lights in our relationship? Is it going to be you or me? Well, here's a goodnight kiss, anyhow.

Whichever way you look at it, Black Box Recorder have come up with a stunning second album. Stylistically, the band have catapaulted themselves into some netherworld halfway between Air and (a less stoned) Velvet Underground but the instrumentation they employ - guitar arpeggios, synthesizers, glockenspiels, chiming xylophones, strings and drum machines - make for an even more fascinating sound than this suggests. "The Facts Of Life" is funkier than "England Made Me" but it's (ch)eerily more optimistic and somehow more poignant too. The band are dealing with universal emotions that you'd be hard pushed to scoff at and their unique approach only makes the truth more palatable. "It's our most flamboyant ambition," says Haines, "to make a second album that sells. To make a record that actually sells well." Well, d'you know something? - I think they just have.

Black Box Recorder release the album "The Facts Of Life" on Nude Records in May. The title track will be released as a single in April.

Phill Savidge.