autostart in fluxbox (ubuntu 16)

Hi,
I recently upgraded from 14.04 LTS to 16 because some stuff that I needed wasn’t backported – not a process I’d recommend for fellow linux novices (this is a roundabout way of wishing for a v16 of Kodibuntu).

One of the things I stumbled on was autostarting kodi in fluxbox (the DE I was left with after the upgrade). I would prefer no desktop at all, and to let kodi take over the X session and run as a service, but don’t know to do that.

My question: When I add this line to ~/.fluxbox/startup:
/usr/bin/kodi –standalone — -nocursor &

My remote control doesn’t work (keypresses are not reflected in debug log either). But when I use this:
/usr/bin/kodi &

the remote works fine. Why?