Consisting of Sarah Nixey, Luke Haines (of The Auteurs), and John Moore (formerly of The Jesus and Mary Chain), Black Box Recorder were an indie band who flourished around the turn of the century. The English Motorway System is a track from their 2000 album The Facts of Life.
Jude Rogers tells us what's going on here:
Another Ballardian beauty from the band, taking Kraftwerk’s love of the autobahn and capturing its peculiar hypnotic qualities as we find them on home turf.
A song about a couple about to break up, it also perhaps the band’s most tender and least blackly comic track, ignited by atmospheric ahhs and their most lovely chorus yet. "It’s going to be there forever", Nixey says, mythologising the tarmac, "it’s never going away".
But I dream of motorways lying derelict with thistles forcing their way up though the concrete. Meanwhile, enthusiasts give up their weekends to keep short stretches the way they used to be.
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