Black Box Recorder
Life Is Unfair
oNE liTTlE iNdiaN Wispish post-Britpop fluff from someone you’d think would sound angrier. Being Luke Haines sucks. You’ll find Britpop’s seething curmudgeon in print, attacking the industry that generously gave him more deals and opportunities than his sales figures deserved. Or on radio, railing against the music press that gave him a solid crack of the whip for a largely hit-free decade or so. Even the box-set collection of his three albums with (onetime married couple) Sarah Nixey and John Moore as Black Box Recorder, complete with defeatist title, has a chunk of the booklet printed upside down. Typical. Talent the size of a planet, etc.
The title of this release is drawn from the most memorable bit of BBR’s unmemorable 1998 debut England Made Me: the nonemore-sardonic line ‘Life is unfair/ Kill yourself or get over it’. If only the band’s records had been so cut-throat. Timid slivers of Haines’s bleak cynicism and murder balladry delivered in Nixey’s Kiera Knightly deadpan over minimalist Gallic pop, England Made Me seemed like a sophisticated response to Britpop at the time, but now sounds like a bloodless
Bontempi Tindersticks, involving the whitest version of Uptown Top Ranking ever recorded. The Facts Of Life (2000) revved
BBR’s sexometer into the beige with the mildly raunchy Sex Life, then killed the mood with bland, soul-pop-flecked songs about motorway systems and home improvement. At least the title track gave Haines his only Top 20 hit by imagining All Saints’ Never Ever as a public education film about puberty.
For 2003’s final album Passionoia, with pop clearly working for them they turned into a wartime schoolmarm Pet Shop Boys, but by now their cover was blown – BBR were three art-school wannabes making a faux-ironic grasp at the charts. And they failed badly.
Now they’re grasping for the box-set completist buck, right down to the muffled amateur comeback gig DVD and vaguely adventurous rarities disc (highlights: the bubble-machine funk of 17 And Deadly and the uncharacteristically volcanic Lord Lucan Is Missing being played live to what sounds like 27 drunks). And no one will buy it.