Black Box Recorder

There are quite a lot of bands I had no real expectation of seeing. These tend to be the ones that had split up either before I’d heard of them or before I could reliably go to gigs. Over the years, a good number of these have played special anniversary gigs - one off shows to celebrate the passing of a large number of years since their albums. Though these shows always come with a hint of “Oh God I’m old now”, it has meant the opportunity to see a whole bunch of bands I narrowly missed first time round. The Research! Camera Obscura! (And booked in the next year both The Sunshine Underground AND Forward, Russia - very excited!). But Black Box Recorder? They remained firmly in the list of bands I never expected to see.

Unlike most of the others mentioned, who I read about in the NME when slightly-too-young to get to gigs - especially the many indie-friendly 18+ venues - Black Box Recorder had pretty much stopped in 2003. I’d never heard of them at that point. Instead, I got into them from the soundtrack of the fabulous Monkey Dust animation. As well as being rude, clever and wickedly funny, Monkey Dust had an absolutely incredible soundtrack. From the opening tune, Eels’ That’s Not Really Funny to melancholy chunks of Goldfrapp, there was a lot of great music in there, but it was a haunting female vocal that really stuck with me, murmuring “It’s only the end of the world…”. I looked them up. Black Box Recorder.

They did 3 albums. They’re all great. There are some top B-sides too. Sarah Nixey’s “opiated debutante tones” (thanks Wikipedia) carry a whole bunch of songs about cruelty, greed and turn-of-the-century life in England. It was an absolute joy to discover that being liked by Billie Eilish (!) has brought them renewed attention and got them a big London show, for which the Brudenell, Leeds was the warm-up gig. It also meant the crowd was a weird mix of ages - with a large part of it in their 40s and a significant number of children (OK, OK, they were probably late teens, but they looked like children)

I don’t really do gig reviews. It was great. Of course it was.