Can new guitar band Razorlight cut it as the new Strokes?
January is a frequently unreliable month for music. It is at this time every year, while most artists and consumers lie low after Christmas, that the major record labels seek to launch the next generation of superstars onto the more devoted sections of the public. Sometimes, the success of these bands in depleted charts or on deserted tour circuits can be deceptive: who now remembers the Bluetones, who entered the charts as Britpop's next golden boys at number two in 1996?
January 2004, however, has seen the emergence of two striking contenders who may just sustain a career into busier months. Most visibly, there is the Glasgow band, Franz Ferdinand, in the top five at time of writing with their terrific hybrid of post-Strokes art-pop and elbows-akimbo white disco.
Out in the venues, though, it is London's Razorlight who are making the running, capitalising on a fallow time for live music with a 10-date tour round the country. It should be a sell-out. They too owe a debt to the Strokes. It's not that Razorlight are Strokes copyists. To be precise, they owe rather more to the Strokes' New York antecedents Television and Patti Smith, as well as more parochial British acts such as the Jam, and their peers, the Libertines. More to the point, bands like Razorlight were made commercially viable by the success of the Strokes' sound - an amalgam of late Seventies New York art-garage and early Eighties US pop/rock. It will be fascinating to see whether this neurotic guitar music so beloved of leather-jacketed vinyl-buyers and music writers can stack up successfully for anyone other than the Strokes, who have the kind of looks and charisma that can magnetise armies of followers without a guitar chord even being struck.
Razorlight are rather easy on the eye, too; 22-year-old singer Johnny Borrell has a head of ringlet curls and big, bruised eyes whose dark circles attest to late nights and - possibly - sights not fit for the gaze of mortals. He is flanked by Swedes. There's shaggy blond Carl Dalemo on bass, who looks as though he could inspire some assiduous mothering at the hands of Razorlight's female fans. And there's close-cropped blond Björn Ågren, who trades kinetic howls of guitar with Borrell. While Borrell is very much at the front of Razorlight, Ågren provides the requisite guitar-nerd levels of skill. Somewhere at the back hitting the drums is the lavishly named Christian Smith-Pancorvo.
At least, we think he is. For the first few songs of Razorlight's set, the band are just a disembodied noise taking place behind a tight wall of Mancunian necks and shoulders. By the time the band launch into 'To The Sea', jittery dancing has loosened the scrum, and the band become just about visible.
For his part, Borrell combats the venue's woeful sightlines by clambering on the monitors every few minutes. He's a picture of rock'n'roll disarray: his sweaty white T-shirt torn at the side, displaying ribs that could double as a washboard. The T-shirt features two pictures of Johnny himself, labelled 'before' and 'after'. Lead singers are not known for their humility, but very few would wear two pictures of themselves on their chests.
Borrell is as self-mythologising in song as he is in apparel. Razorlight's tunes are sung from the point of view of an urchin-sage in tight trousers, alternately castigating or despairing of those around him (often his 'babe'). There's 'Rock'n'Roll Lies', their first single, full of cautionary tales of the dark side couched in heady allure. There's 'Make Up Your Own Mind', about a girl who 'sees the dangers' but might ignore them. Their new single 'Stumble And Fall' has Borrell counselling the lost and disheartened. Live, however, the song takes on scope and magnitude, towering over lesser tracks.
Razorlight are markedly better at the taut, fast sprints than they are at middle-distance mood pieces. Your attention does begin to wander two-thirds of the way in, when 'No No No' (or is it 'Yeah Yeah Yeah'? They have songs called both) descends into unremarkability. But more often it's this well-stoked level of excitement - two guitars clashing and sparking, Borrell preening and yelping - that makes Razorlight a live band worth shoehorning yourself into a sweatbox to see. And then their finale, 'In The City', a song that doesn't wear its influences lightly. In fact, it is an obvious tribute to Patti Smith's version of 'Gloria', with Dylan references interpolated into it. It features Borrell wittering on about Bukowski at the start. Now, you could roll your eyes at these scrawny rock wannabes trying to be dissolute punk poets as well. Or you could go with them: ferried along by the pulse of guitar. Borrell paces like an inmate, spouting stream-of-consciousness rock babble while the band manipulate a storm of feedback. Really, it's not bad for January
Kitty Empire