“I want to go and meet girls,” proclaims Razorlight vocalist Johnny Borrell, sallying out of his dressing room at the Summer Sonic Festival, Osaka. His success, within seconds of stepping outside, is spectacular, if not quite what he had in mind: Borrell is mobbed by literally hundreds of girls. This is a very Japanese form of mobbing, however: these girls are not snipping his hair or trying to kiss him – they’re keeping polite physical distance, snapping photos of him with identical flip-top mobile phones, frantically bowing (a Japanese formality) and cooing “kawai” (“cute”). What’s also peculiarly Japanese about this incident is that it’s highly probable these girls aren’t sure exactly who they’re mobbing (they will do the same to bassist Carl Dalemo later), just that they look like they’re a) Western, b) in a band and c) stars in the making.
Japan’s music industry is in complete agreement with the latter point. While the London four-piece have yet to release a note in the country, they’ve been added to Japan’s Summer Sonic bill alongside The Datsuns and The Strokes, been interviewed by MTV Japan and both the country’s biggest rock magazines. Rightly so. Coming together around songwriter Borrell, drummer schoolfriend Christian Smith-Pancorvo and Swedish ex-pat pals Björn Ågren (guitar) and Carl Dalemo (bass), this is a band that amassed a maddened London following in mere months. A band that impressed Xfm’s John Kennedy so much he junked radio convention and played their demos on his show repeatedly. A band that got signed to Mercury for a quarter of a million. A band, what’s more, that have inspired Steve Lillywhite, the Managing Director of said label, to clear his production schedule (sorry David Bowie, sorry Macy Gray) to work on their album. They’ve barely been in existence a year.
If you’ve heard the chugging guitar charge of debut single ‘Rock’n’Roll Lies’ you’ll be getting the picture: English vocals chiming with New York guitars, charm cut with cheesewire. Imminent second single – the rifftastic one-two punch of ‘Rip It Up’ – will colour that picture in. The album – out next year – will blow it up to saturated 3D widescreen. For this, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is the best new band in Britain.
It’s a day earlier, 6:30am in Tokyo. Unbelievably Razorlight have a soundcheck in an hour, and they’re playing at 10am. Festivals start early in Japan, and as the bus pulls up to the Chiba Marine Stadium there are already hundreds of fans queuing outside. The band look a bit awed, and jetlagged, but Borrell says he’s feeling “fit as a fiddle. A fiddle that’s waiting to be plucked. Then stroked. Then plucked. Then stroked again.”
Borrell’s enthusiasm is infectious: second song into the soundcheck, Red Indian-coiffed drummer Christian Smith Pancorvo (think Joseph of the Nez Perce), blonde-banged bassist Carl Dalemo, dapper guitarist Björn Ågren and Borrell himself all have their tops off. Shortly afterwards, Borrell is spotted weaving past various Kings Of Leon in a crowded backstage café, still topless and clutching a hairdryer. Attention-seeking, you realise, is so natural to these guys they don’t even realise they’re doing it. “It’s taking nine Japanese people to find me a socket,” says Johnny, waving his hairdryer unselfconsciously. “I’m just worried someone’s lost their job over it”
Carl is having similar problems. “I can’t play unless I’m a bit drunk,” he declares: “I need beer!” Japanese minions are again urgently despatched. Westerners want beer: run, run! Suddenly though, there’s a deafening roar. It’s 9am, the doors have opened and thousands of Japanese kids are literally sprinting into the arena, screaming fit to burst. To the power of ten, this will be the biggest crowd Razorlight have ever played to. Hair now blow-dried to immaculate disarray, Johnny takes the band aside and advises, “let’s not be overawed: we’re going to be playing bigger places than this – and headlining them!”
Indeed, Razorlight’s self-assurance is astonishing. They’re a Western inferno in the blazing Tokyo sun. Opener ‘Rip It Up’ immediately gets the crowd clapping along, but the best thing is how much new material this band has: the Dexy-ish ‘Make Up Your Own Mind’, the soulful bounce of ‘Golden Touch’ and the U2-esque ‘Up All Night’ – mellower, more complex songs that round out the adrenaline bursts of the singles. This is a band that not only isn’t going to dry up on our hopes, they’ve got life beyond any ‘new rock revival’. They’ve also got energy to burn: Bjorn leaps around like he’s on springs, Christian rushes down the front to chuck tshirts into the crowd, while Johnny ends the show swaying precariously on the lip of the stage, howling into his mic.
Afterwards, the band cheerily wanders the site: in the main hall there’s a Kabuki theatre, noodle stalls galore and a film of a naked Japanese woman rolling around in the dirt. Later the band are interviewed on a red vinyl couch, surrounded by garish girl doll superheroes, one of whom is armed with a hypodermic. It’s all very Japan.
Curiously, the landscape is not. Having collected a now-reeling Carl, as we bus-fly to Osaka that afternoon for the festival’s second leg, everything looks oddly American. Wide streets. Neon strips. Malls. McDonalds. High rises. Primary colours. Johnny gazes out of the window and says, “So this is America? Well, fuck the stars and stripes is all I can say!” He’s been saving that one up.
Johnny Borrell is a very self-aware young man. When we first arrive he grins and says “ah, it’s the enemy!” He’s quoting Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s movie about a journalist tagging along with a touring band. On the bus to Osaka, noticing me earwigging, he says “write that [salacious comment] and I’ll fucking do you!” Then he grins, and quotes the film again: “Write what you like – just make us look cool!”
Johnny is used to people wanting to help him. The nakedness of his need – for love, for adulation, for fame – certainly brings out an – ahem! – maternal response in women. Even as we adjourn to a noodle hut in the toytown neon ugliness of Osaka, he casually picks up a couple of girls on the way. He gets them to order for us. Gives them passes to the festival and then sends them home, faces beaming.
Razorlight may be a new band, but Borrell has been beavering away for years. Born in 1980 to middle class parents, Johnny went to (public) school with Smith and members of The Libertines. But even taking into account a penchant for self-mythologising, he has lived a far from sheltered life. At 16 he had an affair with his 34-year-old French teacher. And before long the couple were dabbling in some pretty serious narcotics, along with half his crowd.
“In London, when you’re a kid, it’s easier to get drugs than to get into pubs,” he says with typical matter-of-fact romanticism. “Everything’s available. By the time your 17, you’ve tried the lot.”
There have been some casualties in his gang along the way: drug casualties, mental casualties, life casualties, one of his friends having been put away for murdering another. But mostly it’s been an adventure – Johnny wandering around the city with nothing but a guitar, a battered notebook and a bag of dirty laundry. He’d play an acoustic gig in a pub here, crash on his future manager’s floor there, dep for the Libertines on bass here, get looked after by girls everywhere else. They’d provide him with a bed. Wash the clothes. Cook him dinner. Give him money for a taxi back to his manager’s.
And he needs looking after, because Johnny, simultaneously knowing and innocent – is always losing things. His bag. His lyric book (after leaving it in a taxi he found it in a dustbin hours later). His mind. One night, on Ketamine, he felt the whole room slither down the building, then slide down the road into Camden rock venue the Dublin Castle. Hell, even his hallucinations live the rock’n’roll dream.
But despite the little-boy-lost demeanour, Borrell is a do-er not a dreamer. As The Libertines started to go places, Borrell hung out and observed. He says they wrote ‘The Boy Looked At Johnny’ about him, but you put that down to self-mythologising. And an ongoing reluctance to give Patti Smith credit (the line is hers, as is the riff and structure of Razorlight set-closer ‘In The City’). Borrell watched carefully as the Libs let partying take precedence, screwing up their arrangements, production and songs. You know that Johnny will ensure none of this will happen with Razorlight.
It’s another disorientatingly early start (6am) but everyone is in fine – if mildly deranged – fettle. No one’s had more than four hours sleep for four nights. In the dressing room the band does an impromptu a capella ‘Rip It Up’, trying not to giggle. During soundcheck they improvise an entirely new tune, Johnny making up lyrics on the spot. Today his T-shirt reads “Reach Out and Fuck Someone”.
It’s another excellent performance. Another new song, ‘To The Sea’, is a mid-tempo breezer with blistering Television-esque guitar from Borrell. This morning they also roll out another newie, ‘Get It And Go’ which could be a hit, if it weren’t for lyrics like, “First time you’re there really gets you up/Second time’s all right but it’s just not enough/Shoots through your veins, tears all your nerves apart”.
Later on, while Johnny and Carl are being mobbed, we join Christian to watch Hot Hot Heat. “Last night I had a dream that I was dead,” he says, “and it reminded me of Ketamine. You get this thing where you think you’re dead but you’re fine about it.” Those days are gone: now he doesn’t drink or take drugs. “I’m an addictive personality,” he shrugs.
We’re packing to leave, but we have two problems: Johnny and Carl. Johnny doesn’t want to go. Or for the roadie to take his guitar. He has an idea for a song. He wants to meet girls. Within seconds, he’s asleep on the couch, cradling his guitar to his chest. His manager leaves him to it: “Johnny always makes it home. He’s got an incredible survival instinct. And if he loses it, well, there’ll be a girl along to rescue him in a while.”
Carl is another matter. He’s loudly insisting he wants to see Blink 182. Oh, and he needs more beer. His eyes are now drooping as much as his ¾ length trousers – leer and underpants his dominant features. Before we can stop him, he’s barging into Blink 182’s dressing room, attempting to steal their beer and telling them how much he loves them. “Fuck off outta here, we’re onstage in two minutes,” they tell him amiably.
The bouncers that flank Blink onstage are rather less amiable. Obliviously, Carl takes it in turn to piss them off, flitting from one side of the stage to the other, whipping another beer from the icebox on each occasion. Dancing wildly, he keeps knocking into the bouncers, spilling his beer on them, ignoring their increasingly threatening demands to “step back”. He grins, filled with unfounded confidence in his charm. Eventually, for his own safety, we drag him away.
Now, however, comes The Slump. Carl has effectively to be carried out of the venue. Japanese kids look utterly bemused at the sight and people fall over themselves to find us a taxi, nodding madly. Carl is asleep within minutes and has, upon arrival at the hotel, to be carried to his and Bjorn’s room, retching loudly.
Bjorn is already tucked up in bed, beatifically asleep. He admits he gets a bit hacked off with the amount of attention Johnny and Carl get. Thing is: neither little-boy-lost nor beer monster, Bjorn’s just too well-behaved. He’s the one who wont get too pissed, fuck up on his timing, disappear or stay out all night. He will play mean guitar licks and come up with killer tunes. Being ‘the rock’ isn’t the most glamorous of roles, but it’s a necessary one. He deserves his sleep.
It’s Razorlight’s last night in Japan. We’re back in downtown Tokyo. We’ve dined on noodles, seaweed and skewered meats in a stylish restaurant. Now we’re in a bar in sight of the city’s Blade Runner skyscape, all huge flickering neon adverts, techno tickertape and teeming hordes of people. Hordes who never jostle each other or express the slightest irritation – the height of bad manners in Japan. It’s why the suicide rate is high: better to be dead than reveal negative feelings in public.
“I love all this politeness, all the bowing,” says Johnny. “When I get back to London, I’m going to keep it for as long as I can!”
“I dunno, I’m getting a stiff neck,” mumbles Carl through a killer hangover.
Johnny’s getting emotional about leaving. “It’s like watching a girl walking out on you slowly and there’s nothing you can do,” he says. Bjorn, himself given to fruity metaphors says, “It’s quite unfulfilling – like getting a nibble of a huge bowl of delicious food..”
What are they going to miss – Japan itself, or just being mobbed like rockstars?
“Attentions a terrible drug,” says Johnny. “We’ve gorged on it and now it’s gone.” He looks morose. “Tomorrow I’ll be back in Finsbury Park”.
But they soon perk up. Back in London they will, after all, be recording their first album with a top producer in a swanky studio. And anyway, they’ve got the whole night ahead of them. The city’s after-hours bars are calling. Johnny wants to meet some girls.
Toby Manning