Luke Haines's Englishness is so desolte and inhospitable that even the English are scandalised by it.Throughout his career with The Auteurs, his one-off Baader-Meinhof concept album and his increasingly absurd solo material ("a Vaudeville spook mentalist", in his own words), Luke Haines has relished expressing his wry nihilism in a variety of musical styles. However, it is his first album with Sarah Nixey and former Jesus and Mary Chain drummer, John Moore, as Black Box Recorder that would undoubtedly be his bleakest. Unlike subsequent BBR albums where the band fully embraced upbeat electro-pop, England Made Me is slow and minimalist. In Nixey, Haines had found the perfect oh-so-English voice for his dark wit-filled critiques of Britainnia, and it is her vocals that carry the weight of the album.
The title alone of Kidnapping An Heiress gives a substantial insight into Haines's outlook. Like most of British intellectual thought it is rooted deeply in the class divide, and the song has a direct lineage from early Auteurs tracks such as Valet Parking and The Upper Classes. The initial glaring attribute of the song is that semi-annoying musical saw which is looped throughout the its entirety, yet like the rest of the album, it is Nixey's deadpan delivery that is soon the focus - "Rescued from a shopping mall, heiress with a little girl's soul. Do you think we'll make the papers?". While the song may play out like a money-wrangling conspiracy with the chorus of "And we're searching for your daughter" changing into "And we think we've found your daughter" towards the end, as Morely points out in number 42 of his introductions to Haines - One of the reasons to write songs is to get your own back - and while the moneyed may be his targets, money itself isn't his primary concern. Like most of Haines's work the tone is one of absolute moral superiority. There's a game of spite to be played and Haines cannot help but indulge himself.
Kidnapping An Heiress - Black Box Recorder
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