It’s early November in downtown New York. Outside, the post-election gloom is
dissipating as the skating season gets underway and the first crisp whiff of
Christmas shopping kicks in. Inside, Razorlight have just come off stage in
the East Village’s Webster Hall and the buzz around Britain’s hottest new
band is evident from the scene in their tiny dressing room. The director Gus
Van Sant chats to the band’s Kurt Cobain-lookalike bassist Carl Dalemo; Hedi
Slimane, Dior’s latest fashion wonderkid, eyes the shaggy-haired lead singer
Johnny Borrell approvingly; hip tastemakers hover around the guitarist Björn
Ågren and drummer Andy Burrows; while at least two legendary rock
photographers survey the scene knowingly. One of these is THE EYE’s
photographer, Jill Furmanovsky; the other is the permanently shaded veteran
Mick Rock, who rasps enigmatic pearls of rock wisdom like some grizzled old
pirate of the Caribbean: “They’re white slave trade. And they’ve got balls,
you’ve got to have balls to pass through the eye of the needle.” Whatever
that means, it certainly sounds like a compliment.
By contrast, the backstage room for the evening’s headline act, Jimmy Eat
World, features the band and a few mates. So when the famously mouthy
Borrell says, “I’m here to see if I want America. And if I want America I’ll
have it,” you can almost believe him. The ego, it would seem, has landed.
Twelve months ago Razorlight were playing to 200 people at Barfly, in Camden,
and were being mocked by the NME thanks to Borrell’s head-slappingly
misguided implication that he’s a better songwriter than Bob Dylan. But when
their album Up All Night was released in Britain in June, the music
came very close to backing up the big mouth.
Lyrically it is an ode to an edgy, nocturnal London full of cautionary words
for some dissolute muse; musically it’s a jittery echo of mid-to-late 1970s
New York new wave. The album is packed with great hooks and choruses, and
hasn’t taken long to go platinum in the UK. The band, accompanied by a
gospel choir, played their last single, Golden Touch, on Parkinson,
which introduced them to six million middle Englanders. (“He saw us at
Glastonbury on TV. He chose us,” Borrell exclaims, before catching himself .
. . “Crap show, though. So sychophantic.”) Now the band sell out the Brixton
Academy and find themselves championed by Elton John in Rolling Stone.
Franz Ferdinand may have catchier pop hooks and Keane may get more airplay,
yet Razorlight beat them both to win Best New Act at Q magazine’s
definitive awards ceremony in October.
Even so, Borrell looks ill at ease with the schmoozing and soon suggests
slipping away to the empty hotel-bound tour bus. Slouched in his skin-tight
women’s jeans, he cuts a contradictory figure: like a sixth-former, but
astute beyond his years; defensively modest one minute, casually boastful
the next; wearily slumped, yet wired enough to want to do the gig all over
again. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that playing gigs is the
only thing keeping me alive at the moment,” he begins, with expected
overstatement.
Well-spoken and articulate, the 24-year-old makes for far more charming
company than you might expect. He grew up in the leafy, middle-class
environs of Highgate, North London, before teenage rebellion and a life of
drugs and squats kicked in. “I spent two years as the greatest living
teenage cliché you could possibly be. I went around with jet-black hair
looking like Johnny Thunders, with a girlfriend in every part of town,
smoking as much smack as I could and listening to Exile on Main Street 24
hours a day. Great! Then it started to turn a bit nasty. I was getting off
drugs when I was 19 or 20 and I had complete psychosis. I was f***** but
what did I do? I reacted creatively and I always find that in adversity
there is that creative reaction. I started writing then.”
Musically, he had been awoken at 13 when he heard Led Zeppelin’s Stairway
to Heaven on the radio. “It went right through me and made every part of
my body jump up and down.” Confidence was never a problem: at 14 he was
playing a gig at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden. “It was nerve-racking.
But I closed my eyes and when I got to the first guitar solo I opened them,
and everyone’s jaws were on the floor. I thought: ‘I can do this.’” After
kicking about London in a bluesy band with no success, Borrell saw the
Strokes play at Reading two years ago and realised where he was going wrong.
Soon after, Razorlight were formed.
Razorlight may have their own sound, but their musical influences are evident
enough to have critics consistently playing spot-the-reference. Borrell
snorts: “I have a box full of every comparison I’ve had, but if I listened
to it I’d wake up in the morning and think: ‘Hang on. How can I possibly
sing like Jarvis Cocker, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Verlaine and f******
Aztec Camera; how can I do that in one go?’”
Besides, the razor-sharp musicianship of his three bandmates should not be
overlooked, in particular Ågren’s clean, scintillating Tom Verlaine-style
guitar-work. The trio make for great company over a long weekend in New
York, happy to indulge in carousing in downtown bars until the early hours
(and seemingly keen to play a game of “let’s get the Times
journalist plastered”, as I spotted my single shots being surreptitiously
replaced by doubles). The only time they get touchy is when there’s a
suggestion that they are merely a backing band to the frontman’s grand
vision. Yet, whether they like it or not, Borrell is the band’s essential
“X-factor”.
Recently Bono offered him some avuncular advice: “Don’t be afraid of success.”
Fat chance, given Borrell’s previous bold claims (he has also compared
himself to Orson Welles). The great rock’n’roll frontmen have always lacked
that peculiarly English virtue of modesty, but few have boasted with such a
scholarly flourish. It’s hard to imagine Liam Gallagher namechecking Borges
in an interview.
“I read a lot of Allen Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti when I was growing up,” says
Borrell when pressed on his literary favourites, “but I’m not a massive
poetry head to be honest. I like novels. I always like championing John
Fante — some of it’s hard going, but very human. A touching writer. García
Márquez. James Joyce.”
William Faulkner? “There’s something in there. Nabokov — I like his balls;
imagine writing Lolita, then putting it out and saying: ‘There you
go.’”
And what of Borrell’s cojones? Where does he get off apparently
being so arrogant? Borrell becomes exasperated: “I turned around and said
that my record is going to be brilliant, and it was like trampling on some
sacred thing that you are not allowed to say. Why would I do this unless I
thought I could really be doing the best thing I can do? I’m in it because I
know what is a great song, and I know that I won’t be happy until I can put
on great song after great song.”
Borrell couldn’t be happier playing America, a country that rewards thinking
big. “America fascinates me because it is such a contradiction. You have
both Jim Jarmusch and George Bush here. A Ford Mustang — what a beautiful
thing — but what does it run on? F****** petrol that you get from oil that
you only get by making sure that you’re the f****** daddy of the world.
There’s two sides to America, there’s always a dichotomy. James Dean and
Marlon Brando looking cool in Levi’s jeans, and who picks the cotton for
Levi’s jeans? This is a country of extremes. This is why there’s so much
great stuff that comes out of America because everyone’s going ‘how the f***
do I figure this out?’
“Really I’m here to see what it’s all about. I’m looking for America. If that
means I have to count the cars on the New Jersey turnpike,” he says, adding
Simon & Garfunkel to his references, “or I have to play in Madison,
Wisconsin, then so be it. I want to come face to face with the heart of
America.”
The bus arrives at the cheap mid-town hotel at which he’s staying, and we go
to his shabby room to play acoustic guitars with a beautiful Chinese girl in
tow (friend, not groupie; Borrell has a long-term muse on tour with him) and
to unwind before heading back out to join the aftershow party.
Plenty of British bands have come to America, done one tour and mistakenly
believed that they had cracked it. But Razorlight seem to understand that
the land of the free has only fallen for bands who have been prepared to
graft through every venue from Wisconsin to Wyoming and back. And then do it
all over again and again. Think of Led Zeppelin, The Who or U2. Razorlight
already have two more American tours planned for early 2005 — even the
band’s PR admits that it could take 18 months for the band to earn the
4,000-strong crowds it now enjoys in Britain.
America have taken to Coldplay’s epic melancholy and, perhaps surprisingly,
Franz Ferdinand’s droll art-school pop. But Razorlight’s mission harks back
to a much older tradition of a British band taking an American sound,
layering it with some English style and wit, and selling it back
successfully. “You look at all the English bands that have done it over here
and it’s a great lineage. This whole country is built on the Beatles and the
Stones, and The Who and the Animals,” says Borrell.
Another night, another venue. In New Jersey, the band play to about 200 people
in the hip rock club Maxwell’s. The crowd is a mix of bemused regulars,
curious music scene hipsters and, interestingly, a few Paris Hilton types
who have made what, for them, must be an epic journey from Manhattan. “This
is the Razorlight sound,” declares Borrell as the band tear into an
onslaught of three-minute wonders with no flab, just sinew and cheekbones. A
ska-inflected new song called (Keep the Right) Profile attests to the
band’s desire to explore different directions, but the gig really receives a
power surge when Borrell unstraps his guitar and strips to the waist, Iggy
Pop-style. Staring the audience in the eyes and clambering around the stage,
the urchin-Jim Morrison finishes with some stream-of-consciousness blather
about a No 29 nightbus as the band lurch through the stop-start theatrics of
their superb, Gloria-inspired closing number In the City. It’s
hard to remember the last British frontman to command a stage with such
classic rock’n’roll bravura.
Afterwards the band are surrounded, rather comically, by Italian-accented
fahionistas as they try on clothes for a backstage L’Uomo Vogue
photoshoot, while out front the audience reaction is positive, if not
exactly delirious. “A bit derivative, but a good frontman,” says one
twentysomething dude, while a couple of college girls offer that “they could
make it ’cos he’s a cute guy”. But while all agree that the singer is
dynamic and the bassist could be a model, there’s uncertainty as to whether
the kids of middle America could take to them. A soulful-looking chick
concludes that: “They’re an English band emulating a New York band emulating
an English band. That’s a negative thing because you want to see things
progress.” Tellingly, most agree that their performances will get even
better when they have more material.
At the next day’s photoshoot under the Brooklyn Bridge, the band braves the
icy Atlantic breeze by drinking hot chocolate and challenging each other to
running races. As their skinny frames start to freeze, the shoot moves to
the brick-à-brac shops of Chinatown, allowing the band to lark about buying
souvenirs and donning novelty accessories. In the van, Borrell picks up his
guitar to make up new songs, with all four singing harmonies. It’s all a bit
Fab Four.
Will they break the States? If not, America’s loss will be our gain. For now
at least, Razorlight are bringing back some swagger to a stale musical
climate, where the polite mainstream seems to have become something to be
embraced. As the man said, they’ve got balls. Isn’t it about time we had
some of that back again?
Razorlight’s single Rip it Up is just out on Vertigo
