Smash hit

So, are you a poser, Mr Borrell?

“Of course!” he shoots back. “You gotta be. What you gonna do? You’re in a rock’n’roll band. If anybody’s rule book says you’ve got to stare at your feet and mumble, ‘Here’s some songs’, then I ain’t playing by those rules. The front men I loved when I was growing up were Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury. That’s four topless front men.” And that – not Doherty, not Liam Gallagher, not him out of Snow Patrol – is the lineage of which Johnny Borrell sees himself as a continuation.

Borrell and Razorlight drummer Andy Burrows are sitting in a West London gastropub on a crisp autumn lunchtime. Burrows spent the weekend with his girlfriend and two-month-old daughter. Borrell went to see US comedian Sarah Silverman with his pal, Mighty Boosh gadabout Noel Fielding. Burrows is unshaven and student-scruffy. Borrell wears a new-looking black Burberry Prorsum coat and a gold-and-black checked scarf, both of which stay on during the interview. They’re accessorised with one dangly gold earring and his straggly, barely collar-length hair tied back (in a My Little Ponytail).

Absent today are “the Swedes”, bassist Carl Dalemo and guitarist Björn Ågren, whom Borrell recruited via a “musicians wanted” advert. Borrell has form for slagging them off in the press, something he insists he doesn’t regret. Burrows joined Razorlight just before the release of Up All Night in 2004, beating “a queue of 65 kids” in an open audition that lasted two days. He replaced an old schoolmate of Borrell’s, Christian Smith-Pancorvo, who left with some acrimony (the health-conscious drummer seemingly didn’t fancy the excesses attending the fast-rising band’s lifestyle). How would Burrows describe the mood in the band when he signed up?

“It was a bit difficult for me,” the drummer replies. “I remember thinking it was so rock’n’roll when I first joined. There was this Swedish bass player who looked like a model and behaved like some kind of… well, getting pissed all the time and throwing things. We were in Tokyo, and I was carrying Carl up a hill, he’s just trashed a restaurant – I was like, what the f*** is this?”

Even the famously affable drummer wasn’t immune to the chaos within the ranks of Razorlight. Two years ago he and Borrell had a fight in indie-celeb hangout the Hawley Arms. “I had quite a lot to drink that night. It wasn’t a nice time for the two of us. But all these things just added to our closeness.”

He admits he deliberately and repeatedly provoked Borrell that night (although both profess not to remember what it was that was actually said). But the fight was not, as reported, over authorship of America, one of the band’s biggest songs. As Burrows points out, he and Borrell are listed as co-writers on the album sleeve.

Burrows, 29, shares writing credits with Borrell on four songs on Slipway Fires. The drummer, who earlier this year released a solo album to raise funds for a children’s hospice, wrote his contributions at his London home. Borrell, who says he’s currently single after three back-to-back, “very important, very deep” relationships, wrote during three months’ seclusion on the Hebridean island of Tiree [although he doesn’t talk about his past inamorata, Borrell split up with Kirsten Dunst last summer]. Why did he go there?

“I’d hit a crisis of faith in music, life and love,” he replies in what sounds like a rehearsed line. Borrell’s in full-on charmer mode, but it does seem to be just that: a mode. Our long interview is topped and tailed with candid and measured spiels. In the middle, when we’re talking about drugs, fights and trial-by-tabloid, he gets agitated and interesting.

After the last tour, he continues, “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make a record. I should stress it wasn’t in my mind to quit the band,” he adds, mindful of the perennial rumours that he’s one big hit record away from a solo career. “I just felt that if I was gonna make any music I had to reconnect with it.”

He rented the remote cottage from a friend of a friend. In part he was trying to “recreate by artificial means” the experience of writing the first album while on the dole in London. “I didn’t take my guitar with me. I just went with a pen.” The ascetic, unplugged lifestyle helped him “process a lot. In my private life and my public life I hadn’t really stopped for four or five years.”

He thinks the stark geography and setting of Tiree may have “to an extent” influenced the songs he wrote. “It’s really windy. It gets all the wind in Europe first. It comes up and back down from the Pole. Yeah, I’m sure that somehow crept into it.”

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