‘We Friend at the Bar – With Lyrics Attached’: Black Box Recorder’s Dazzling Comeback, Thanks to Billie Eilish | Pop and rock

COn Moore, guitarist for Black Box Recorder, adopts a weary tone as he tells this story. “Our daughter said to us, ‘Have you heard of Billie Eilish?’ His reaction was not what she expected. He said: “Yes.” “You ruined our retirement.” This spring, he, Luke Hines, and singer Sarah Nixie (the mother of said daughter, though long separated from Moore) will return to the stage for the first time since 2009, thanks in part to their stratospheric streaming numbers after Eilish posted videos of herself listening to her 1998 debut single Child Psychology.

The song, about a troublesome girl who refused to speak up, was expelled from school and fell out with her family, is typical of the Black Box Recorder’s obsession with psychological breakdown in a quaint, often suburban and middle-class, English milieu: stories Nixey tells in her shimmering but deadpan vocals. It’s a combination that later broke Black Box Recorder into the UK Top 20 with 2000 single The Facts of Life, and spawned three albums that still stand out from the rest of British pop.

The trio are sitting in the place where it all started in the late 1990s – a table in the corner window of the Spread Eagle pub in Camden, London. Haines, who had achieved a measure of success with his band The Auteurs, and Moore, who had been the drummer for the Jesus and Mary Chain, dreamed up an avant-garde noise project that would release a single called Black Box Recorder: a recording of a slow washer that was meant to sound like a plane crash. Haines suggested they try writing more traditionally, and so Black Box Recorder became, in Moore’s words, “a pub camaraderie with a few songs attached”. They just needed someone to serenade them.

Moore saw Nixey performing backing vocals in a band called Balloon and asked her to sing for Black Box Recorder, promising: “We’ll make you famous.” At the time, she was 23 years old, and was unfazed by the approach from two men who kept talking about their age, even though they were only about a decade older than her. “John really reminded me of Withnail,” she says, referring to the brutal man played by Richard E. Grant in the 1987 black comedy “Withnail and Me.” “And I didn’t know what to do with Luke. We just circled each other for a while, and then we realized that we actually liked each other. I knew we could get something interesting out of this.” She adds that she “rolled her eyes a lot” but also found it funny. She tells them: “You have found something in some of you that you have not seen in others.”

They used their connections in the music industry to provide free studio time. When Nixey heard the demo for “Girl Singing in the Wreckage,” she felt that — since this song about the violent aftermath of a car accident was so devoid of emotion — she should sing it in an equally deadpan style. “These songs had to be presented in a really emotionally restrained way, and that’s why it worked.” RP’s unabashed vocals and unimpressive delivery are combined with the disturbing content of the lyrics to disturbing effect.

This meant that the Black Box Recorder’s 1998 debut England Made Me stood out amid the post-Britpop swell. However, Haines insists that, despite the title, this was not a conscious reaction to what they saw around them on the streets of Camden: spectators “covered in grease” falling from George and Nicky’s café opposite the Eagle Spread. He says the Black Box Recorder “lived entirely in his own world. It was the way of England before Britpop.”

“It was Graham Greene’s England,” Moore continues. Their words were shaped by his circumstances at the point where he and Haines met. “I was a broke guy who was signing a contract, doing a part-time job, and it was all shit; no friends and floating around with no prospects at all. You have to hit rock bottom to start a band like Black Box Recorder.”

Nixie “had never really seen two men who had such a literary relationship, or talked the way they did.” Haines and Moore had a shared sensibility shaped by Greene, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Wyndham Lewis’s post-war novel Rotting Hill, British eccentricity and a keen sense of the absurd, as well as the absinthe that Moore was importing. Black-box England was “a muddled model village, obscure yet ornate,” Haines says.

Plans for their first single, “Girl Singing in the Wreckage”, were abandoned because it was felt that it came too soon after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when Britain had descended, in Haines’ words, “into a form of hysteria”. It could be said to have been one of the first of what he described as the “national mood” that has swept us ever since. “A lot depends on hysterical reactions that we cannot understand or pinpoint,” he says. “You get these weird political moves that come out of it.”

Nixie believes that although these songs were not overtly political, they were “about home-grown pressures within society, adolescence, and the monotony of it – repressed despair”. That’s why they connect so well with a new generation facing new kinds of boredom and toxic interpretation of the English language.

When Moore says, “Old fans think songs are about death, while young people think they’re about life,” his joke has an element of truth. Nixey feels that young women took Black Box Recorder seriously as representing their place in life, while listeners in the 1990s wrongly assumed they were being sarcastic. Perhaps their most famous line is the startling child psychology chorus: “Life’s unfair, kill yourself or get over it.” This caused Nixie some fear about young listeners being unduly influenced before she concluded: “No, there’s no real risk. There’s a manageable risk. It’s a matter of fact, like a cold weather report. People are reaching out and saying the songs have really helped them.”

Today, her simple vocal style comes as a pleasing contrast to some less conservative pop stars, who express themselves through earnest punk. “Vulnerability is done, and sometimes it’s too much,” she says. “When you listen to someone who is emotionally restrained and has more control, you will find safety.”

As the ambiguity of Nixey’s singing resonates with the sensibilities of a global audience of young women, Black Box Recorder’s ambivalence about England makes it strikingly relevant in the turmoil of our contemporary moment. We are witnessing a polarization between a nostalgic view of a nation that never was, its worst instincts manifested in anti-immigrant racism, and, on the other side, a simplistic notion of an irredeemable right-wing dump. Black Box Recorder’s interest in the unnatural, violent and horrific but also in the literary and entertaining is a most interesting lens through which to explore our present.

It seems like the decision to reunite was easy. However, they are tight-lipped about 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 attaching a union crane to a lamppost. He says these incidents are “black box recording,” but she doesn’t want to force them to get creative. For now, the upcoming concerts will be an opportunity to “psychologically own their songs,” as Hines puts it. “They are our lost children, and it would be nice to give them the talk and take them out into the world again.”

Ironically, Black Box Recorder’s debut run ended as the music industry retreated from the piracy that took hold in the early 2000s, only for the band to be revived by a new incarnation, where influencers and streaming companies’ algorithms have the power to launch or relaunch acts. Perhaps it was Haines – who mercilessly details those years of turmoil in Bad Vibes: Britpop, My Part in its Downfall and Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll – who had the last laugh. “None of us have any complaints,” he says with a smile. “We don’t want Billie Eilish to explain herself and apologize,” Moore adds.