Knife in the fast lane

Johnny Borrell is the sweetest egomaniac you could hope to meet. Razorlight’s frontman is neither a braggart nor a boor; shooting the breeze with hotpress he shows no desire to proclaim, Gallagher brothers-style, his divine genius or deride other bands (he has previously sparred with The Kooks and declared Arctic Monkeys flash-in-the pan laggards). Frankly, we’re a bit nonplussed. Go on, Johnny – say something controversial.

“Controversy follows me around, doesn’t it? I never go looking for it – at least not intentionally,” laughs Borrell, stretched, cat-like, on the sofa of his London flat.
He’s being a little economical with the facts, surely? This, after all, is the same Borrell who early in his career compared himself to Bob Dylan (the actual quote is rather nebulous: “If Dylan’s making the chips, then I’m drinking the champagne”).
“When I said those things about Dylan, I was living in a squat, without a penny to my name – I thought it was hilarious to go on like that,” he proffers. “The problem was that people took what I said at face value. They actually thought I was serious.”
Mouthing off seems to come naturally to Borrell, who makes no secret of his dreams of arena stardom. Of course, you don’t need to talk to him to realise that. The 26-year-old’s budding messianic complex is writ large on Razorlight’s self-titled new record, a suite of super-sized anthems and phones-in-the-air ballads that practically plead for mass adoration.
“The record was conceived as a classic pop album and I think we have gone some way towards achieving that,” he reckons. “Everyone in the group was determined to create a record that stood the test of time. Great pop is always timeless. We didn’t want to make something that was linked to a specific scene or a specific moment is time.”
Could this be a veiled reference to the Arctic Monkeys, whom Borrell recently castigated as all hype and no trousers? Grimacing slightly, the singer chooses his words carefully. He is not, apparently, in the mood for a cat-fight.
“It’s true of any band who is caught up in a particular scene,” he says eventually. “Five years from now, when someone sits down to listen to a record, they’re not going to know about the hype. All they hear is the song. It has to stand on its own two feet.”
The first the wider public heard of Razorlight was when they played at Live 8 in London last year ( their 15 minute set was squeezed between Snoop Dog and Madonna ). It’s no exaggeration to say news of Razorlight’s appearance met with general bemusement. Pete Doherty was already on the bill. Did this not fill the quota for debauched indie dandies?
As it turns out, Live 8 may have been the making of Razorlight and the breaking of Doherty (Razorlight were triumphant, the worse-for-wear Babyshambles man an embarrassment). The irony will be lost on neither: Borrell fell into music after coming into the orbit of Doherty and his (then) Libertines partner Carl Barat. Early on, there appeared little doubt as to who was the more likely drug casualty – Borrell had a crippling heroin habit and appeared to be on an irrevocable path to self-destruction.
“It sounds cheesy, I know. But music really did save me,” he confesses. “If I didn’t have this wonderful thing in my life, there’s no telling where I might have ended up.”
A tearaway since his early teens, Borrell grew up in genteel north London, attending the fee-paying Highgate School. Initially, his rebellion was quintessentially suburban; he would skip class to watch cricket at Lords “with a can of special brew in me hands”.
By the time he turned 15, though, things had taken a turn for the sinister. Borrell was regularly imbibing LSD and spending the nights in squats. Two years later, ensconced in the Doherty Barat- circle, he was semi-homeless and dabbling in heroin.
Borrell is reluctant to be drawn on the period, particularly his relationship with Doherty. But he does agree when I observe that the Babyshambles singer has started to live up to his media caricature: “I think it is true to say that Pete has tried to become this person we see in the tabloids and that’s such a tragedy.”
Music would eventually throw Borrell a lifeline. In 2002 he posted an ad seeking a guitar player citing as the required influences “the Stooges, Velvet Underground and Lenny Kaye”. The missive caught the eye of Bjorn Agren, an ex-pat Swede, who brought along his bassist friend Carl Dalemo. With Johnny’s old school mate Christian Pancorvo filling in on drums (he has since left), Razorlight was born.
Immediately, Borrell set about proclaiming the band’s brilliance. Even before the release of Razorlight’s debut, Up All Night, he was preaching his songwriting genius to journalists. The world – or at least the part that'd heard of him – held its breath, expecting Razorlight to shortly fall on their faces. To the surprise of everyone but Borrell, they have triumphed. While neither Up All Night nor its sequel are the stone cold classics he imagines them to be, these records certainly have the chops to slay America.
You can tell Razorlight are going places because every second young band in Britain seems to have cribbed Borrell’s sartorial sensibility. Back stage at Oxegen recently, one couldn’t throw a pint glass without striking half a dozen clones. Dandy chic is today the same thing as indie chic, for which we have nobody to thank but Borrell.
“Yeah, I’ve started to notice that too. You asked whether people see me as Johnny Borrell, style icon, as opposed to Johnny from Razorlight and maybe that’s true to an extent. So long as it gets publicity for the band I don’t care. “
Whether the indie-bloke masses will continue to take style tips from Borrell is less certain. For the rest of the year, he has vowed to wear nothing but white on stage.
“That’s really putting it up to all those other bands,” he says, giggling. “Let’s see ‘em try and rip me off now.”