June 28, 2021 12:13 pm
Summer 1998: The UK was at the height of that political-cultural marketing operation linked to Prime Minister Tony Blair known as Cool Britannia. The terminal phase of britpop mingled happily with the global success of the Spice Girls and on the radio he felt alone Things can only get better by the Irish D: Ream, the official anthem of New Labor in the 1997 elections. The image of the United Kingdom had never been so optimistic, so young and so necessarily cheerful: the final of the 1998 Eurovision song contest was held in Birmingham and was marked by the historic victory of Israeli trans singer Dana International. In this atmosphere of cheerful cheer and unbridled optimism, an unknown indie rock trio releases a single titled Child psychology in which, in the first verse, it is about a girl who at six decides to stop talking. The singer speaks more than singing, she seems in a trance, and when she sings she does it only to sing a gloomy refrain: “Life is unfair, kill yourself or get over it”. We are not exactly in Spice World.
The Black Box Recorder are a strange trio composed of Luke Haines (former leader of Auteurs, an edgy britpop band who never wanted to have anything to do with britpop), John Moore (former drummer of Jesus and Mary Chain) and Sarah Nixey, an enigmatic singer “with a Pre-Raphaelite beauty” (these are the words of Moore, who will later marry her).
Child psychology obviously goes awful and to make matters worse, when a launch is attempted in the United States, with perfect timing comes the Columbine massacre. At that moment the American radios certainly did not want to program a dismal British song about incommunicability and suicide; a wicked little pop song inspired by the Tin drum by Günter Grass ea Is that all there is? by Peggy Lee.
Yet the Black Box Recorder label, Chrysalis, believes in them and finances an entire album for them. And so, in July 1998, it comes out England made me (“England Made Me”), a collection of claustrophobic pop songs that explore the most unsightly crevices of the British national psyche. The title of the album is the same as a 1935 novel by Graham Greene (The castaways in the Italian translation), a story of lies, cross betrayals and double lives.
And the cover is also striking: it’s a portrait of the wrestler Adrian Street, in full dress from glam rocker, next to his working father in a Welsh coal mine. Behind them, posing like two Elizabethan noblemen, the other miners, black with soot behind the bars of the freight elevator that has just brought them back to the surface.
England made me, the song that gives the title to the album is the keystone of everything. The opening line, sung with perfect diction and impassive tone by Sarah Nixey reads:
“I trapped a spider under a glass,
I kept it there for a week to see how long it lasted,
He looked at me,
He thought he would win,
We waited,
And he believed that I would give in ”
And instead it will not give up. The narrator of the song continues his exploration of that spirit of oppression so exquisitely British: the corpse of a stranger killed for fun and then hidden in the trunk of a car, an unsolved case, because all in all “people like yellow “. And then the final thrust: “I need my privacy, I have a double life, I sleep with the enemy and then I betray both sides.”
Not even Lana Del Rey, whose singing staggeringly resembles Nixey’s, was so surgical in dissecting the twisted California psychology of the new millennium. There is a British word that describes that way of singing: deadpan. In Italian we could translate it as “impassive” but it is not entirely correct. Deadpan (which comes from dead, dead, and pan, frying pan which in popular jargon also means face) indicates that kind of British impassivity halfway between the professional detachment of a doctor who has to tell you that you have an incurable disease and comic times with a certain macabre humor. Sarah Nixey is black belt of deadpan.
The album also features a cover of a cheerful British reggae track from the late seventies, Uptown top ranking by Althea & Donna. Luke Haines in his book Post everything: outsider rock n roll describes what the Black Box Recorders did of that delicious tropical summer hit. “Uptown top ranking it is, in its original form, pure happiness, and any kid of the seventies could confirm it, ”writes Haines. “Once the Black Box Recorders got over it it looks like she was fucked with an elephant sedative (…). We are truly alchemists of evil: you give us the sun and we give you back only pure nihilism ”.
Next time you wonder how he managed to win Brexit in the UK, put on this little, cynical, forgotten post britpop album. Many things will be clearer to you.
Black Box Recorder
England made me
Chrysalis, 1998
.