{"id":500293,"date":"2026-02-26T07:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T07:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/500293\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T07:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T07:08:11","slug":"were-a-pub-friendship-with-songs-attached-deadpan-dazzlers-black-box-recorder-return-thanks-to-billie-eilish-pop-and-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/500293\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We\u2019re a pub friendship \u2013 with songs attached\u2019: deadpan dazzlers Black Box Recorder return, thanks to Billie Eilish | Pop and rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Moore, the guitarist in Black Box Recorder, adopts a weary tone as he tells this story. \u201cOur daughter said to us, \u2018Have you heard of Billie Eilish?\u2019\u201d His response was not what she was expecting. \u201cYes,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s fucked up our retirement.\u201d This spring, he, Luke Haines<\/a> and vocalist Sarah Nixey (the mother of said daughter, though she and Moore are long separated) will return to the stage for the first time since 2009, in part thanks to their streaming numbers going stratospheric after Eilish posted videos of herself listening to their 1998 debut single Child Psychology.<\/p>\n

The song, about a disruptive girl who has refused to speak, been expelled from school and fallen out with her family, is typical of Black Box Recorder\u2019s obsession with psychological breakdown in a peculiarly English, often suburban and middle-class setting: stories related by Nixey in her sparkling yet deadpan vocals. It\u2019s a mix that later broke Black Box Recorder into the UK Top 20 with 2000 single The Facts of Life, and produced three albums that still stand apart from the rest of British pop.<\/p>\n

double quotation markYou have to hit rock bottom to start a band like Black Box Recorder<\/p>\n

The trio are seated in thespot where it all began in the late 1990s \u2013 a table in the corner window of the Spread Eagle pub in Camden, London. Haines, who had a measure of Britpop-adjacent success with his band the Auteurs, and Moore, who had been the drummer for the Jesus and Mary Chain, dreamed up an avant-noise project that would release one song called Black Box Recorder: a recording of a slowed-down washing machine that was supposed to sound like an air crash. Haines suggested they try writing more conventionally, and thus Black Box Recorder became, as Moore puts it, \u201ca pub friendship with some songs attached\u201d. They just needed someone to sing them.<\/p>\n

Moore had seen Nixey do backing vocals in a band called Balloon and asked her to sing for Black Box Recorder, promising: \u201cWe\u2019ll make you famous.\u201d Then 23, she wasn\u2019t fazed by this approach from two blokes who kept going on about how old they were, despite only being around a decade her senior. \u201cJohn really reminded me of Withnail,\u201d she says, referring to Richard E Grant\u2019s louche wild man in Withnail and I, the 1987 black comedy. \u201cAnd I didn\u2019t know what to make of Luke. We circled each other for a little bit, then realised we did actually like each other. I knew we could get something interesting out of this.\u201d She adds that she \u201crolled her eyes a lot\u201d but also found them hilarious. She tells them: \u201cYou\u2019d found something in each other you didn\u2019t see in other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I rolled my eyes a lot\u2019 \u2026 Nixey singing with the band in 2009. Photograph: Barney Britton\/Redferns<\/p>\n

They used their music industry connections to cadge free studio time. When Nixey heard the demo of Girl Singing in the Wreckage, she felt that \u2013 as this song about the violent aftermath of a car crash was so emotionless \u2013 she should sing it in an equally deadpan style. \u201cThese songs had to be delivered in a really emotionally restrained way, which is why they worked.\u201d Her unashamedly RP vocals and affectless delivery combined with the disturbing content of the lyrics to discomfiting effect.<\/p>\n

It meant that Black Box Recorder\u2019s 1998 debut England Made Me stood out amid the post-Britpop bloat. However, Haines insists that, despite the title, it wasn\u2019t a conscious reaction to what they saw around them in the streets of Camden: scenesters \u201ccovered in grease\u201d falling out of George and Nikki\u2019s cafe opposite the Spread Eagle. Black Box Recorder, he says, \u201ccompletely lived in its own world. It was an England way before Britpop.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an England of Graham Greene,\u201d Moore continues. Their lyrics were shaped by his circumstances at the point he and Haines had met. \u201cI was a penniless guy who was signing on, doing a part-time job, everything was threadbare; friendless and floating with no prospects at all. You have to hit rock bottom to start a band like Black Box Recorder.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Nixey \u201chadn\u2019t really seen two men having such a literary relationship, or talking in the way they did\u201d. Haines and Moore had a shared sensibility shaped by Greene, Louis-Ferdinand C\u00e9line\u2019s Journey to the End of the Night, Wyndham Lewis\u2019s post-war novel Rotting Hill, \u201cBritish seediness\u201d and a keen sense of the absurd, plus the absinthe that Moore was importing. The England of Black Box Recorder was \u201ca deranged model village, murky yet ornamental\u201d, Haines says.<\/p>\n

Plans for their first single to be Girl Singing in the Wreckage were abandoned as it was felt to be too soon after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when Britain had descended, as Haines puts it, \u201cinto a form of hysteria\u201d. It was arguably one of the first of what he describes as the \u201cnational moods\u201d that have swept us ever since. \u201cSo much is based around hysterical reactions that we can\u2019t make head nor tail of,\u201d he says. \u201cYou get these weird political moves coming out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Billie Eilish\u2019s Instagram showing her listening to Child Psychology by Black Box Recorder. Photograph: @billieeilish\/ Instagram<\/p>\n

Nixey believes that, although these weren\u2019t explicitly political songs, they were \u201cabout pressures created domestically within society, adolescence, the mundanity of it \u2013 a contained despair\u201d. This is why they\u2019ve landed so sweetly with a new generation facing new kinds of ennui and a toxic interpretation of Englishness.<\/p>\n

When Moore says, \u201cThe old fans think the songs are about death, the young think they\u2019re about life\u201d, his joke has an element of truth. Nixey feels that Black Box Recorder are taken seriously by young women as representing where they are in life, whereas in the 90s listeners wrongly assumed that they were being ironic. Their most notorious line is probably the show-stopping chorus of Child Psychology: \u201cLife is unfair, kill yourself or get over it.\u201d It caused Nixey some trepidation about young listeners being unduly influenced before she concluded: \u201cNo, there\u2019s not a real risk. There\u2019s a managed risk. It\u2019s matter of fact, like a cold weather report. People get in touch and say that songs have really helped them.\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markThe songs are our wayward kids \u2013 and it\u2019ll be nice to give them a talking to<\/p>\n

Today, her understated vocal style comes as a pleasing contrast to some of pop\u2019s less restrained stars, who express themselves in earnestly empowered honking. \u201cVulnerability is performed and sometimes that feels too much,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you listen to somebody emotionally restrained, who\u2019s a bit more in control, there\u2019s a safety.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the ambiguity of Nixey\u2019s vocals connect with the emotions of a global audience of young women, Black Box Recorder\u2019s ambivalence about England makes them strikingly relevant in the turbulence of our contemporary moment. We\u2019re experiencing a polarisation between a nostalgic view of a nation that never was, its worst instincts manifested in anti-immigrant racism, and on the opposing side, a simplistic concept of an irredeemable right-wing dump. Black Box Recorder\u2019s interest in the nation\u2019s seedy, violent, drab but also literary and amusing aspects is a far more interesting lens through which to explore our present.<\/p>\n

Moore, Nixey and Haines of Black Box Recorder in 2003. Photograph: Andy Paradise\/Andy Paradise\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

The decision to reunite was apparently easy. However, they are reticent as to whether there will be new Black Box Recorder songs, perhaps about the family Moore recently saw shaving their heads for charity in an English country pub, or the man who fell to his death while tying a union jack to a lamp-post. These incidents are \u201cvery Black Box Recorder\u201d, he says, but they don\u2019t want to force their creativity. For now, the forthcoming gigs will be a chance to, as Haines puts it, \u201cpsychologically own\u201d their songs. \u201cThey\u2019re our wayward kids, and it\u2019ll be nice to give them a talking to and set them off into the world again.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is an irony that Black Box Recorder\u2019s first run ended as the music industry buckled from piracy taking hold in the early 2000s, only for the band to be revived by the new incarnation, where influencers and streaming company algorithms have the power to launch or relaunch acts. Perhaps Haines \u2013 whose books Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall and Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll mercilessly detailed those years of turmoil \u2013 has had the last laugh. \u201cNone of us have any complaints,\u201d he says with a smile. Moore adds: \u201cWe don\u2019t want Billie Eilish to explain herself and apologise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black Box Recorder play London Palladium on 22 May, with further dates to be confirmed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Moore, the guitarist in Black Box Recorder, adopts a weary tone as he tells this story. \u201cOur…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-500293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}