Black Box Recorder: Garage, Highbury, London

'ENGLAND MADE Me' was the most poisonous record of 1998, driven by the sick, silent laughter of Auteur Luke Haines. The likes of 'Girl Singing In The Wreckage' could be seen as the spidery Biro scrawlings of a broody adolescent fantasising about murdering all the people who ignore him at parties, but it was carried off with such deadpan elan that you had to smile — after all, Haines and John Moore probably had smiles on their faces when they made it. As for vocalist Sarah Nixey, her persona — St Trinian's head girl turned arachnid-torturing sociopath — made her the perfect cipher for Haines' blackest sentiments ("Life is unfair — kill yourself or get over it"). That her words weren't her own somehow made the whole exercise seem more deliciously evil.