Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell has just landed in New York, the most densely populated city in the Western world. Most people arrive feeling dwarfed and diminished by its awesome, indifferent magnitude, but then Johnny Borrell isn’t like most people. He’s here, along with the three other members of his band, to crack America in just under a week.
Which is, as Oasis discovered to their disappointment back in 1994, fighting talk.
Most British bands tour backwater broom cupboards for years before anyone over here takes any notice. Razorlight have instead opted to play a handful of shows in just two cities, NYC and Austin, Texas, where they’ll be performing before the entire US music industry at their annual South By South West knees-up. If this sounds cocky, then that’s because it is.
Razorlight are the most extraordinary mix of rock’n’roll adrenaline and huge personalities to fall out of Britain since the Gallagher brothers. Whatever setbacks befall him on this trip, Johnny is adamant that everything’s going to be fine – better than fine, in fact, incredible – that he’s going to write the greatest concept album of all time, that people will remember the Borrell family name in 20 years time and that there’ll be “rejoicing on the streets of fucking Merseyside or wherever it is we’re playing that night”
And, perhaps for the first time since Oasis, you kinda believe him.
“The album’s going to be really special. It’s not just a collection of songs, it’s a concept album and it’s the tip of the fucking iceberg, just the start” Johnny Borrell.
Razorlight have just played their first US gig in front of record company big cheeses sporting’ impress-us-then’ postures in the Lower East Side’s Mercury Lounge. Under the circumstance they perform valiantly, their early nerves dissipating with the fiery opening bars of ‘Rock’n’Roll Lies’, Johnny pacing the stage like a paranoid Jim Morrison. And yet the experience is still promising rather than life-changing.
“Well, what did you think?” asks Johnny, after were introduced in a neighbouring bar. “I’ll read it anyway so you might as well just tell me.”
So we tell him: there were bits we liked (‘In The City’, a reworking of Patti Smith’s punk-poetry cover of ‘Gloria’), bits we loves (the spiky ‘Which Way Is Out’) and bits we weren’t so sure about (the new single ‘Golden Touch’). Without pausing, Johnny reaches into his bag and pulls out a CD Walkman.
“Go outside, stand in the snow and listen to it on this, then tell me you don’t like it,” he demands.
Outside, with millions of snowflakes illuminated in the night sky, even this rough, unmixed version sounds perfect: a gentle acoustic lament for the kind of girl that provokes malicious gossip wherever she goes.
“I know,” replies Johnny when we tell him. “I’m proud of that one.” Remembering the vitriolic ridicule levelled at Johnny from certain circles following his now notorious NME interview (“if Dylan is making the chips, I’m drinking champagne”), we guess that ‘Golden Touch’ isn’t just about a girl.
“It’s just funny what people get upset about,” he says. “If I was black it would be fine. It’s just this cultural thing that you expect people who make indie music to gaze at their shoes the whole time. You know you’re on the right track if people are getting pissed off, ‘cos they always do when you’re doing it right.”
At this point the Swedish section of Razorlight – ex-pat hometown friends Carl Dalemo and guitarist Bjorn Agren - walk in and Johnny, suddenly bored, runs off into the snowy night. NME goes to the bar and by the time we return Carl, who is apparently allergic to alcohol, has transformed from a picture of professional austerity into a raging beast. He knocks over drinks and lurches towards us, punching the sofa terrifyingly close to our faces, gobs on the floor, screams random lyrics from old Wannadies songs and mumbles incomprehensibly about journalists. For a climatic finale, he raises the tape-recorder that Johnny has left behind high above his head and makes to hurl it in our direction. Thankfully he has a sudden change of heart, and instead screams into its microphone, “And you can quote me on that!” before passing out on the sofa. The next morning, video footage from later that night surfaces, featuring the bassist banging his head against a wooden table and demanding “another Jack Daniel’s and gin.”
“It’s obvious from what I put out to the world that there’s two distinct sides to what’s going on. I write these songs, I play them and it’s an art; I spend a lot of time on it. But then, on the other side, I’m a performer and I can only exist within other people’s eyes. I’m Paul Simon and Iggy Pop.” Johnny Borrell
Thirty hours later Johnny Borrell is standing in the departure lounge in New York’s LaGuardia airport throwing a hissy fit at his tour manager. He has a date in Texas with two gospel singers on Zane Lowe’s travelling Radio 1 show but has missed his flight.
“There has to be a way,” exclaims Johnny. “Did you tell them about my sick cousin?”
The frontman hasn’t been to bed yet. The night before, Razorlight played a gorgeously ramshackle show between a TV and a clothes rail in someone’s front room, and Johnny was last seen heading out into the icy streets of Williamsburg wearing nothing but a silk dressing gown.
Today, luckily for Johnny, the airport staff have just found a space on the next flight out of here. Once aboard Johnny expresses saucer-eyes fascination at everything. “Look at that!” he squeals at the floor-to-ceiling gadgets in the pilot’s cockpit. Johnny films the entire journey on his Super 8 camera, refusing to let NME sleep (“Do something useful in these four hours, like tell me your life story”)
We land to find the gospel singers who were due to provide backing vocals on Johnny’s solo rendition of ‘Golden Touch’ have given up and gone home. He decides to record it by himself while he waits for them to return, but is noticeably disappointed.
Later that night he says: “I went in there by myself, and the first time I played the song, it was just so fucking good. Heartstopping. Then the singers finally turned up and we put it down, but I couldn’t really tell by then. It’s not about doing something that’s good enough for that particular moment, it’s about something that’s good enough to last 20 years.”
It seems strange that the most important date for Johnny on this mini-tour is the one he plays without the rest of Razorlight. Would he rather work solo?
“What do you think? What’s your impression of me from the outside. Well, yeah, I think that’s pretty clear to everyone.”
“Sometimes I feel so confident. I’m on top of the world 50 percent of the time. And the other 50 percent it’s just dizzying fits of insecurity, confusion and traffic in your mind. I think it was Tom Stoppard who said, ‘You’re smack bang in the middle of a contradiction and that’s the best place to be’. Well he could live in my head, man, if he fucking wanted to!” Johnny Borrell
The next morning, Razorlight drive out into the Texan desert to pose for some press shots and clear their heads. The industry circus of SXSW is starting to get them down.
“I don’t like this place. It’s not amazing is it?” snarls Johnny. “Why am I here? There’s a thousand bands here and that’s never good for me. It’s a production line and you’re a cog in it, which isn’t all that edifying.”
Things aren’t helped by the news that Christian Smith-Pancorvo, Razorlight’s teetotal hippy drummer, went off to climb up a tree yesterday and hasn’t yet come down. No-one knows how to get hold of him. Finding a long, desolate road off the beaten Texan track, the band crack on with the shoot regardless.
That night Razorlight turn up at The Bitter End. Off the main SXSW strip and away from the throng of conference delegates, the venue is filled with people who have actually made the effort because they want to see this band, rather than stumbled in by accident. For Johnny, this is evidently more edifying. Even Christian shows up for the occasion.
The show is one that even Johnny could be proud of. “The most important thing about playing,” he said earlier, “is that everyone loses themselves.” Tonight all four members of Razorlight do. Bjorn seamlessly chopping in and out with scuzzy melodies, Carl giving it his best Cobain impression, Christian a primal force and Johnny climbing on every object in sight trying, as if it were possible, to take things even higher.
Afterwards Carl and Bjorn decide to celebrate by trying to find whatever entertainment Austin has to offer at 2am on a Saturday night. They ask their singer if he wants to come along. As is his habit, he replies in the third person: “Johnny Borrell’s guide to life: always leave the party early.”
As we trawl the streets encountering shut bars at every turn, we wish we’d listened to him. Because, for Johnny’s hyperbole, enthusiasm, glorification and overwhelming need to be fully understood (which, by the way, is actually a lot more charming than a lot of people would have you believe), he is usually right about things. And after tonight’s show, we’ve got a funny feeling that 20 years down the line, history might prove that again.