A Mellow Crash Landing

“My very first memory I think was, it’s so tricky, I think it was probably not much before I was three years old, and one of the most prominent memories I have is getting up and singing to the rest of my nursery group when I was three. And I sang Brown Bird in the Ring, by Bony M. I don’t know how I knew that song. My mother used to listen to the radio all the time, so it must’ve been on the radio a lot around that time and I decided I just really loved it, as a three year-old,” laughs Black Box Recorder’s lead singer Sarah Nixey. “And, uh, I used to sing it all the time. I asked my nursery school teacher to accompany me on the piano and I sang it for everyone.”

With any other pop singer you wouldn’t be blamed for doubting the authenticity of that story. Sounds a little too good to be true doesn’t it, a pop singer’s earliest memory is that of singing to her nursery school class? Couldn’t be a nicely made up story for the press could it? But Nixey is pretty straight forward, both in her interview answers and in her singing delivery. If you’ve ever heard Black Box Recorder you’ll know what I’m talking about. For example, they recently recorded a version of David Bowie’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide as a b-side, which was adapted to Nixey’s vocal style. “I didn’t know whether I was going to do a proper full-on Bowie belter or just to make it completely understated, which I obviously went for at the end of the day,” Nixey concedes. Understated indeed, for that is the best way to describe both Nixey and the band.
by Mark Redfern


Black Box Recorder were formed in 1998 by Nixey, Luke Haines of The Auteurs and John Moore, a onetime drummer with The Jesus and the Mary Chain. But was Nixey a big fan of indie darlings The Auteurs? “Not a big fan, no,” she admits. “I’d heard Luke’s material before and I really liked Baader Meinhof. But it was really John that I met first of all and I was working with John on some of his songs and doing backing vocals for him. Then he and Luke got together and wrote Girl Singing In the Wreckage for me, specifically for my voice. It sort of took off from there. So it was kind of a chance meeting really. [Girl Singing In the Wreckage] was the first song we ever recorded together. We sort of decided after that that maybe we’d do an EP and then we sent the demos around to record companies and they fortunately just gave us a load of money and we recorded an album and decided to form the band. Yeah, it just sort of took on its own life after that.”
Their first single from their dark debut album England Made Me was “Child Psychology,” and it was banned from both the radio and MTV because of the lyric “Life is unfair/Kill yourself or get over it.” Nixey obviously feels that this was an over-reaction. “I think the line was actually incredibly positive, you know, kill yourselves or get over it. We just thought it was tough love really, nothing negative about it. Um, it’s just kind of ‘get on with things,’ that was more the theory behind it. But you know, these radio stations can be quite sensitive at times, so whatever. They banned it, so we made a better single the next time.”

That better single was their first UK top 20 hit The Facts of Life, off their second album of the same title. The album continued their themes of sex, suicide and adolescence. “Yeah, we sort of deal with the same things, you know, on each album really,” Nixey admits. “Generally sex and death, which kind of count for everything. And adolescence, I suppose, and childhood. Quite universal themes really. They crop up in a lot of songs and we do tend to base our records on those types of themes.”

They managed to get Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey of Pulp to remix The Facts of Life single in quite an unlikely way. “Luke was at a party and I think that Jarvis said to Luke ‘can I have a cigarette?’ and Luke said, ‘yeah, if you remix our single.’ And I think that’s the way that it happened, it was very very simple, and Jarvis said, ‘yeah okay.’ So that was that,” laughs Nixey. The Jarvis and Steve remix (remixed under the name Chocolate Layers) splices in samples from strange ‘70s porno films and the like. “Yeah, goodness knows where they got those,” Nixey wonders.

A lot of Haines’ and Moore’s lyrics can be quite dark, which is a nice juxtaposition to the perverse pop sound of the music and Nixey’s fragile matter-of-fact vocals (which are always kept up in the mix). Nixey didn’t have much trouble adjusting to Haine’s morbid themes because she doesn’t think they are as bad as all that. “I don’t think they are morbid, they’re just dealing with reality. We’re not singing happy clappy pop songs, for example, and they’re not inane in any way. They’re actually quite clever and humorous. A lot of the lyrics are quite ironic. So I don’t see them as being particularly downbeat or depressing. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s quite refreshing to hear something real,” Nixey explains.
"We sort of deal with the same things, on each album really, generally sex and death, which kind of count for everything"
And yet The Deverell Twins, off of The Facts of Life, is about communicating with twin brothers who drowned in London’s Thames River over a century ago. And a song like Gift Horse is clearly dealing with themes of death, opening with the line, “They’re digging up human remains in Notting Hill.”
 “That was actually based on a murder in London,” Nixey reveals, “It was quite odd how it happened, because I walked past this house and saw a load of police, it was all sealed off, and wondered what had happened. And the week afterwards we were rehearsing and John and Luke started rehearsing this song, and it was about that murder and I’d actually walked past the house that it happened in. So it was quite strange how that came up. That was specifically about a news item that had been on during that time of writing. And it was based on the woman’s point of view who’d been killed. That was just a reference point really. Like
most things, I think what Luke and John tend to do is that they take something, like a news headline or something muttered in conversation or something that’s come up in pub conversation and they use that as a reference point and they take it from there.”
Changing tracts a little bit, we got a little more personal with Nixey, asking her which other female singers influenced her. “I think Deborah Harry is my all time hero. I think she’s absolutely incredible, and she’s still brilliant. She epitomizes sex, basically. And she’s incredibly strong. So I think when I was very very young, in the ‘70s, I saw her on TV and I was transfixed with her,” praises Nixey. “Then, after that, when I was about 13, I got really into Madonna during her ‘Like a Virgin’ phase and ‘Into the Groove.’ But I don’t think they really influenced the way I sing. I don’t think I’ve particularly modeled myself on anyone. I think that I’ve just sort of taken their images into account, I suppose. I’ve not really thought about what I could take from their vocal styles for myself. I think I’ve just created what’s right for songs John and Luke have created for me.” Of course, Nixey sounds more like Velvet Underground era Nico than the Material Girl.
When asked who’d she’d like to have play her in a movie of her life, Nixey says that she’d like to play herself, revealing that she’s originally an actress. “That’s what I started off doing. That’s what I learned at college, I spent three years training. And then when I graduated from university I worked in theatre for a bit and then we started the band, so I’ve pretty much concentrated on doing that,” she laments. “But I’d love to go back and do just some short films. I’m not interested in doing any kind of major films, but just maybe some independent films. Maybe after we finish this record.”

Right now the band are concentrating on recording their follow up to The Facts of Life. Nixey admits that even though the record company hasn’t said anything, the band feels pressure from themselves to repeat and even improve upon the success of The Facts of Life. They also want to focus on somewhat breaking America and are optimistic about their chances. “We think we’re going to do really well, we think we’re going to be really big,” Nixey boasts about cracking the States, even though their songs have little chance of advancing beyond college radio airplay.
Nixey is more humble when it comes to how she’d like the band to be remembered in the pages of musical history. “I think just remembered,” she replies.

Finally, since she’s already regaled us with her earliest memory, what would be the ideal way for Ms. Sarah Nixey to die? Her perfect final memory? “Um, peacefully, very happily, maybe quite intoxicated, with someone who loves me very much who will kiss me to death. I think that’d probably be the best way.”
Check out albums England Made Me and The Facts of Life, as well as the recently released b-side collection The Worst of Black Box Recorder, which includes their version of Bowie’s “Rock N’ Roll Suicide” and the Jarvis Cocker/Steve Mackey (both of Pulp) pornographic remix of “The Facts of Life.” All available on Jet Set Records.