“Life is unfair,” sings Sarah Nixey. “Kill yourself or get over it.” As pop choruses go, it’s a dark one; as dark songs go, Child Psychology is even darker.

Dark enough, in fact, to be banned from UK radio when it was released as the debut single of Black Box Recorder.

It’s the largely spoken story, narrated with fragile detachment by Nixey, of a woman who stopped talking as a six-year-old child and was dispatched to the titular shrink in the hope of a cure.

Using the sung-spoken hybrid sprechgesang long before the likes of Dry Cleaning, Self Esteem and Emily Breeze – and arguably an influence on all three – Black Box Recorder were a unique proposition.

The trio, completed by former Jesus And Mary Chain member John Moore, were unveiled in 1998 by Luke Haines after his band The Auteurs broke up, and made their debut with the album England Made Me. 

The songs, treading a thin line between social comment and satire, included a memorable cover version of Althea and Donna’s reggae hit Up Town Top Ranking, with Nixey reciting the original’s patois lyrics in cut-glass convent-girl vocals.

Stripped of any sense of pop cheeriness, the songs sound sparse because they are infused with a spatial quality suggesting that, beneath it all, there lies only emptiness, and nothing good comes from emptiness. 

Except that it did, when the title track of their second album, The Facts Of Life, gave them a Top 20 hit – something Haines had deserved ever since he began making music with The Auteurs.