It is one of the last Top of the Pops recordings, and from the dressing room
opposite Razorlight’s come mild Scottish accents and the sound of fruit
being nibbled as Belle & Sebastian prepare to take the stage. In the one
next door, first-timer Lily Allen is being helped out of her jeans and into
an enormous bustled dress by her mother.
In dressing room 24, though, Razorlight’s bass player Carl Dalemo and lead
guitarist Björn Agren are listening to the band’s drummer, Andy Burrows, who
is stuck in the corridor, beating a comedy percussion routine on their
self-locking door in the hope of being let back in. Oblivious, the
steely-eyed frontman Johnny Borrell is staring at the mirror while he has
his hair tousled and his face made up. “He likes to be pampered,” whispers
his publicist.
The Razorlight team are surprised that La Borrell has even turned up on time
for the Sunday morning shoot. It had been assumed that the “lone wolf”, as
one of them calls him, would ignore the soundcheck and cruise in just in
time to pout his way through In the Morning, the first single from their
second, eponymous album. Indeed, one cameraman is so pleased to see him that
he nearly knocks over Dalemo in a bid to get to the singer.
The rather handsome bassist is grumpy about this for hours afterwards; he
resents being in a band that gets treated as Johnny Borrell and the
Razorlights. “Yeah, that’s right, the Swedish people don’t count,” he
mutters over a pint of lager at the BBC’s rooftop bar, after I suggest that
it is the Burrows and Borrell axis that provides most of the songwriting
muscle.
“Johnny will only hang out with Andy, not us,” says Agren, his fellow
Scandinavian. “It can create a certain marginalisation. It’s just weird that
people think it’s him and the three Stooges. What, do they think he could
write all those parts? He wouldn’t be able to, I can tell you that
exclusively.”
They say that Borrell once tried to learn some Swedish, “but he just wanted to
learn things like ‘My sword is powerful’.”
Is that a local proverb? “No,” sneers Agren, “I’m guessing sword was a
metaphor for something else. Basically he just wanted a pick-up line.”
Later, with Razorlight’s day at the BBC over,done, their make-up artist bids
them farewell. “I’ll see you...erm,” she says, trying to remember their next
appointment.
“In my dreams,” Borrell replies, flashing her a smile.
Does Johnny Borrell ever feel like a cliché? “Yeah, of course I do,” he
replies. “Just like I’m sure you feel like a clichéd rock journalist
sometimes.”
Face to face, Borrell is not what you expect. His perceived egomania has
delighted the press, but he is softly spoken and quite a giggler. He is
recording our interview himself, which is unusual: he apologises but says he
is tired of being misquoted. He can still misrepresent himself, though — at
one point he interrupts himself: “Sorry, that doesn’t make any sense. I’m
just talking complete b**** now.”
The 26-year-old North Londoner has been on something of a learning curve these
past few years. Whereas once he was sharing a scruffy flat with former best
mate Pete Doherty and dreaming of being a rock star, his band has now sold a
million albums, been asked to support the Rolling Stones, and played a Live
8 set that astounded both fans and critics by being rather good actually.
The former public schoolboy says he used to bitch about other bands so much
because he hadn’t tasted any success of his own. “One thing I’ve been
getting a lot of in the past two years is perspective. When I started out I
was naive about the press and I probably did slag a lot of other bands off.
“It wears a bit thin after a while, doesn’t it? It’s like getting off your
face, falling out of a taxi and vomiting — it seems charming when you’re 17,
but perhaps not now.”
He says he doesn’t get that drunk any more. And as for drugs (he has claimed
to have used heroin), “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “I don’t
want to be a spokesperson either for or against them. Whatever I say,
that’ll get pulled up as the big quote.”
The most controversial thing about Borrell these days is how much he denies
being controversial. “I don’t think I’ve ever given a contentious interview
in my life. I’ve told a lot of things exactly as they are, and people don’t
like that. I have” — he searches for the right words — “made claims about my
virtuosity which I have enjoyed making.”
He giggles. What about him saying that he was better than Bob Dylan? “Somebody
asked me if our first album was going to be better than Dylan’s and I said
unquestionably yes. His first album’s s***. “
“I didn’t realise it would upset so many journalists — but I don’t think it
upset anybody else in the world.” Borrell says people just can’t get a
handle on who he really is. “It’s like, if I’m not ticking all the right
boxes to meet one person’s perception of what a rock star should be, shall
we sit here and think about which ones I should be ticking?” If Borrell is
getting conflicting messages on how to be a rock star, the rest of his band
are even more confused. Ågren tried having a rock’n’roll moment in a hotel
room in America. “I was so angry that I threw a bottle of water on to the
bed — but it bounced and hit me on the back of the head.” Burrows suffered a
similar fate when his attempt to impress some girls in a swimming pool ended
in him ramming his head into the wall.
And then there is Dalemo, who spent his childhood collecting stamps from
former communist countries, making lists and listening to his record
collection in alphabetical order. “But I gave that up because it took too
long. I gave everything up. I’ve lost all my rituals,” he sighs.
One thing all four members agree on is their excitement about the new album.
It’s a very different sound from their debut, Up all Night. Gone are the big
riffs, replaced by a much starker sound, and even a Phil Spectorish girl
band vibe in places, as on Who Needs Love, which was inspired by Borrell
breaking up with his girlfriend.
“I could have sat down with a guitar, played a minor key and gone ‘She’s
gooooone, it’s so haaaard’, but I realised that to make a serious point you
don’t have to be serious.
“That song was a breakthrough for me. I love the whole album’s defiant
brightness.”
Another likely single is America. Burrows explains its origins: “We were in a
hotel in Ohio — and Johnny won’t like me telling you this because he wants
it all to be ‘Ooh, it just came from the stars’ — but this Billy Joel record
came on. And he said: ‘Why haven’t we got a song with a drumbeat like this?’
So I said: ‘You can have one if you like’.”
There’s also a certain tenderness to some of the lyrics. “I get drunk and
sentimental/ I need a touch that is gentle,” Borrell sings on Kirby’s House.
Is that his true self lurking under there? “That’s such a terrible line — ‘I
need a touch that is gentle’,” he giggles.
“I don’t know if I’m going to get away with that.”
Razorlight is released on Monday by Vertigo
