Razorlight

'I don't even look human'

He claims to be a better songwriter than Bob Dylan and has likened himself to Charles Dickens. But is there more to Johnny Borrell, the lead singer of chart-topping Razorlight, than sheer rock'n'roll swagger?

Laura Barton finds out
Wednesday July 28, 2004
The Guardian

Borrell: 'I could have been a poet but I've never seen anyone perform poetry and not been bored out of my head. It's a dead art form'

In the half-light of mid-afternoon Johnny Borrell sits in the empty Camden Barfly. He is all angles and cigarette smoke, chicken-legged in his women's jeans, hunched over in his chair. Borrell is the pigeon-chested heart-throb of the hour, the lead singer of Razorlight, a band famous first for their cock-a-snook attitude, and then for their debut album, Up All Night, a visceral, Patti Smith-laced paean to London that went to the top of the album charts. At the age of 24, Borrell has an impeccable rock'n'roll pedigree of drugs, squats, bravado and mingling with the Libertines. With such credentials and such bone structure, it is hardly surprising that young hearts beat furiously for the tufty-haired, Bukowski-quoting braggadocio with the lip-curling voice.

The newfound pin-up status rests awkwardly on his bony shoulders. He levels me with an intense stare and says: "If I saw me I'd want to speak to me, too - I'd think, 'That guy looks like he's from Mars, he's somehow strangely compelling.' I don't even look human," he concludes, drawing his mousy hair back off his face to reveal a set of otherworldly cheekbones.

Borrell's arrogance is legendary. He has, in recent months, likened himself to both Charles Dickens and Orson Welles, and proclaimed that he is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan. Conducting a conversation with him is a little like sharing a house with a teenager as his sentences lurch from charming to petulant and back again. On the subject of Highgate school in north London, for example, where he studied for two years, Borrell bristles: "I don't really want to talk about it, know what I mean? Why would I want to talk about school? ... I mean, I might as well start talking about my mum, and my mum being ill, it's fucking personal." And the bedroom door slams shut.

He is more effusive on the subject of his musical adolescence, recalling that T'Pau's China in Your Hands was the first record he ever bought - "It was a theme she had/On a scheme he had/ told in a foreign land/To take life on earth/To the second birth/and the man was in command," he quotes. "What was all that about?" Or explaining that he was introduced to the work of Public Enemy at the age of 11 by a friend's older brother, "who was very cool - he had tattoos - Marilyn Monroe on one arm and Kiefer Sutherland on the other."

The defining moment in the life of the young Borrell came when he was 13, at a time when "the idea of listening to rock music struck me as just the gayest, stupidest thing you could do in the whole world." But one evening, sitting in his older brother's room, he heard Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven playing on the radio. "The song was very beautiful and the melody kept coming back to me and I kept trying to catch it but I couldn't, y'know? So I sat up every night waiting for it to come on the radio again, without really realising it had been a one-off. And then at the end of the week I went down to Camden market and bought a bootlegged cassette. It just totally blew my mind, kidnapped my brain."

Such was the combined impact of Stairway to Heaven and Joni Mitchell's California, which he heard around the same time, that he sat down with a guitar and a chord book and composed his first song. "It was a beautiful folk song," he declares unabashedly. "It was about specifics and universals, like every good song should be. It was about how I felt about a girl and about my guilt about growing up and towards my family and stuff like that - cos it's very confusing when you're 13." Soon he was playing his first gig in front of 200 people at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden. "It was the first time I stage-dived. It was the first time I did a gig. It was the first time I got laid."

On Up All Night, London has been his very visible muse, with references to Dalston and Weavers Field and L-O-N-D-O-N. "You write about what you see," he says simply. "And that's why I hate [Irish band] the Thrills - I think they have great songs but what's the point about singing Don't Go Back to Big Sur?" He spies London's charm in some unlikely corners, however, waxing about "the dirt on the streets, King's Cross, the feeling of having no money, waiting for the night bus and not getting on the night bus, arguing with the driver and having to walk home."

It is unlikely that Borrell will be seeing this side of London much longer - after all, do rock stars catch night buses very often? "I've walked up Camden High Street just now and it took a lot longer than it used to," he admits. "It's weird. They say, 'Hi, Johnny Borrell,' and I go, 'Hi.' They say, 'Can I have your picture?' and I say, 'Course,' and they say, 'Thanks,' and I say, 'That's a pleasure.' Cos it is."

It is a sense of well-grounded pleasure he hopes not to lose, having grown disappointed by the demise of his own rock'n'roll heroes. "I don't think there are any legends of rock any more," he spits. "I think they're all a complete disgrace. You get a fucking OBE or an MBE and you go and play polo and stuff like that. I met Rod Stewart the other day, and I went ... " - he starts singing softly - " ... 'I wish that I knew what I know now' and he just said, 'Yeah,' and he patted me on the back."

But he has already found fame inhibiting in other ways. He confesses to not having read a book or "fallen in love with" an album for a long while, and writing songs has grown harder. "To write you need to have experience," he says, "and to experience stuff you actually have to have a life." But he has a contingency plan: "What I'm doing at the moment is I'm latching on to the 1% of things - you know, when you say 'I love you' and you mean it and you mean it and you mean it, but there's always a 1% that feels the complete opposite? So I'm latching on to the 1% of situations, and then you magnify and exaggerate. It's like Borges," he adds, in a typical Borrell flourish, "when he wrote The Zahir and I."

Borrell has allegedly also been the subject of a song The Boy Looked at Johnny, by the Libertines, though he swats away the suggestion. "They just pick lines at random, that's the way they do it, the line is from a Julie Burchill book. They do that magpie thing." Though he confesses there is a line in it - "He did it with his hat on like in a saddle with his gun" - that nods to him. "That's about how not to cheat on your girlfriend," he admits sheepishly. "Which was a bit of a mistake I made."

He is feisty on the subject of why rock music matters, why Razorlight matter, more than once referring to rock as a "valid art form". "Y'know, I could've been a poet," he swaggers, "but I've never seen anyone perform poetry and been anything other than bored out of my head. Cos it's a dead art form, you know? The whole point of Razorlight is to get something that means something and has some artistic merit coming out of your speakers in three minutes. That's why movies work. It's a shame theatre can't do that, but it can't."

Yet just lately he has found himself restless to step outside the world of rock. "I just want to go and see things that aren't gigs," he says. "I really feel the need to be entertained. I wanted to go to the opera the other day, but it starts at seven o'clock, so what's the point?"

He loves dancing, though he hasn't been for a long time. "But when I dance, it's incredible," he boasts. "I can't describe it, there's no words. You just tap into your mojo and you just go. And sometimes," he adds, looking wistful, "I just wanna fucking get on a motorbike or a car and fucking drive as fast as I can, just as far away as I can." And does he ever do that? "No," he mutters, "I don't have a licence."

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