A Boy Called Johnny

Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell is quite the case study. A born pop star, all tousled hair, mouth and trousers, he’s also an introspective songwriter whose sensibilities have much in common with idiosyncratic mavericks like Peter Perrett, Nikki Sudden or even the young Mike Scott. Razorlight have managed to magnify those idiosyncrasies into something that translates on a populist level without skimming on substance. Probably the best example of this was their breakthrough single ‘Somewhere Else’, a ragged-voiced crie de couer that made number 2 in the UK in 2005. The band’s most vulnerable song to date was also their most powerful. It’s a trick the 28-year-old Borrell admits they actively sought to repeat on their third album Slipway Fires.

“It felt like we were stalking the feeling we had to make that record on this one,” he says. “It kept reminding us of those sessions.”
Borrell is often portrayed as being a bit full of himself. Certainly, the individual I met in the Morrison Hotel on a Friday afternoon in mid-October was not lacking in confidence, but he was also open, articulate, and even charming. Maybe it’s his ambition that irks the class-conscious UK inkies. When rock ‘n’ roll became ‘rock’, the arts labs graduates – The Beatles, the Stones, Roxy Music, Bowie – shamelessly plundered streams of film, theatre and literature for ideas. Since Oasis, there still lingers the notion that you’re a ponce and poseur if you venture beyond the local boozer for inspiration.
“I’ve got lash marks all down my back!” Borrell quips, a slight, vaguely androgynous figure. “But Bowie got that at the time; it’s not like everyone was going, ‘Oh well done David, that’s exactly what the world needs right now, a rock star wearing a dress. Cheers!’ And when the Velvet Underground were happening, there weren’t people sitting around going, ‘Oh isn’t that wonderful that they’re writing a song about scoring heroin.’ So I think you kinda know you’re on the right track if you’re upsetting the media a bit – without going into shock territory.
“The weird thing is, in a lot of ways you’d think it’d be impossible to shock these days because we’re living in a time when you can go into any record store, or iTunes, and download any kind of expletive-laden, satanic, pornographic kind of music you want to get, it’s just there, no problem. But the other day, my publicist was talking to this journalist who said, ‘I hear the Razorlight album’s really great, but I can’t like it because Johnny’s wearing an earring and pearls on the front.’ And you’re like, ‘What? This is 2008!”
40 years after Jagger and Richards, 50 after Little Richard.
“Exactly. I’m saving the moustache and lip-liner for the next one! But it’s provocative if people are not quite sure if you mean it or not. People know that if you’re in Slipknot it’s posturing, it’s a fuckin’ act.”
But then taboos get recycled and repeated. Every generation of self-styled outsider artists will get gyp for wearing eyeliner on the street.
“Totally. I was in North London the other day walking by a school with my mate, walking past a bunch of kids, like the hard lads from the school, and they turned around and called us faggots, and I was relieved – I was worried the whole of London had become metrosexual in the last ten years. Excellent! I was deeply worried that all the school bullies were moisturising.”
Todd Haynes’ film I’m Not There recently drove home the degree to which Bob Dylan’s mid-60s enfant terrible persona was self-conscious and self-created. Did Borrell go through years of sitting in his flat, working on his own mythology?
“In one way, yeah, completely, and in another way not. You’re using the one half as a vehicle to get the other half there. I always really responded to that about Dylan, that Warholian self-creation, him and his manager.”
Thing is, it doesn’t necessarily diminish the work. Dali was a great painter but also a great salesman. The moral being, as long as the songs stand up, all else is fun and games.
“Yes. And it should be. Completely. That’s what you’re doing it for. But also, you can’t actually judge your own music, or your own myth, you just can’t. I can just about imagine what I’m explicitly delivering to the world in interviews and that kind of stuff, but I have no idea what I’m subliminally getting across to people. One of the good things about the band getting to an uber-successful place on the last record, was that stuff snowballed so out of control you couldn’t even think about it. And that’s what put us in a position to make a record that didn’t give a fuck what everyone else was doing.”
That record, Slipway Fires, is Razorlight’s most eclectic but also most poetic album. The self-mythologising element is there in ‘North London Trash’ (“I was raised by the radio in a broken home”), but songs like ‘Blood For Wild Blood’, ‘The House’ and the slow, obsessive blues of ‘Stinger’ are stark, Dylanesque tumbles of words, while the superb single ‘Wire To Wire’ and ‘Hostage Of Love’ sound like distress signals, SOS messages from the heart.
“We were on tour doing the second album for 18 months,” Borrell explains, “and we became a big band in that time, lots of stuff happened, and I just had to stop and go away and process everything. It was like I was hitting a sort of crisis of faith, in music, life, love – everything. And it was a question of getting away from it and then seeing if those things would reach out and grab you back, and I feel this album is part of that. I went away and wrote most of the songs in the Hebrides for three months…”
Ah yes, on the Isle of Tiree. What was that like?
“Well, I was trying to recreate the solitude that I had when I was writing the first album when I was on the dole in London, so you had to spend three days at a time with nothing but your record player. And I was trying to recreate that artifically by putting myself in the middle of nowhere, I would be days and days at a stretch with nobody else around, just writing. It was good in that sense, a good antidote to being in hotel rooms for 18 months.”
So his psyche needed a bit of recalibration.
“Reset, completely, on every level. From having our first hit record to then was pretty non-stop. Also, in my personal life, I hadn’t been single in four or five years, I had three girlfriends sequentially, and I needed to just stop and think about stuff. It was such an extreme change, although it wasn’t quiet, because it’s the windiest part of the UK, the Gulf Stream is coming all the way up and hitting the west coast of Ireland and the Hebrides before it hits anywhere else.
“So when I came back I knew I’d been writing a lot, I had a notebook full of stuff, but I didn’t know if it was songs until sitting down with Andy (Burrows, Razorlight’s drummer and co-writer of hits like ‘America’ and ‘Before I Fall To Pieces’), and then it was bang-bang-bang. Andy’s such a great musician, it just kind of happened. And I think that thing keeps it from disappearing into darkness.”
Well, rhythm is a great antidote to introspection.
“Rhythm is an amazing thing.”
And maybe that’s why Razorlight are a far more impressive live proposition than many of their contemporaries. They’ve never shied away from putting on a show. Even viewing their Glastonbury and Live 8 sets through the dead medium of television, it’s obvious Borrell will not leave the stage without having moved the crowd in some fashion. There’s a humility about that which is at odds with Borrell’s reputation as an arrogant so-and-so.
“I turned to my manager once and said, ‘What am I doing?’” the singer recalls. “‘This is just crowd-pleasing.’ And he said, ‘Whoever cites crowd-pleasing as a negative thing is the biggest fucking idiot! Of course it is! That’s what you’re doing!’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, okay.’ Twice in my life I felt like, ‘Shit, maybe I’m reasonably good’, and that was the first time I tried to write a song, and possibly even moreso, the first time I ever tried to stand on stage and sing in front of people. I couldn’t sing, I could just about stand. But I just felt like (mutters), ‘I think I can do this.’ For me, the shoegazing thing has always been anathema. I used to get bored at gigs. When I was a kid I’d love the band, but I’d just go, ‘C’mon, give me something!’”
But there’s a sort of collateral that comes with thinking big. As Delmore Schwartz put it, in dreams begin responsibilities.
“There’s a lot of things to say about that. On one level, you can see the course of the band in that, wanting to prove yourself each time with each record. And yeah, it’s thinking big, and trying to prove that each time and live up to that. Then the other side of it is on a personal level: there’s more at stake with each moment of passing time in your life, because you’re realising that the stuff around you is more and more important and more and more precious. So those two things probably came together in this record.
“The way I felt about it was that, from the first time I picked up a guitar when I was 13 or whatever, to November last year, I was constantly running and exploring whatever I wasn’t allowed to explore, from smoking a first cigarette to finally being allowed to go backstage at a gig to being invited to the party you were never invited to because suddenly you’re famous or whatever, always trying to see what’s behind that curtain. But then there was that point of going, ‘Okay, I’ve been around the world, I’ve seen a lot of stuff and it’s like, “Well nothing’s really changed.’” The next adventure is to look at what’s around you and what you are, and that was the adventure of writing these songs.”