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Razorlight
Some people love them and some people hate them – because of their singer Johnny Borrell.

12 questions put to “green” Johnny Borrell
by AngieBlack

Lots of papers and magazines report negatively about him, but he just doesn’t care.
Is that the reason for all of these mixed feelings about Razorlight?


Mr. Borrell, Razorlight have been around since 2002 and you’re already on your third drummer. What happened to your last drummer, Andy Burrows, who left you in March?

JB: Well, I suppose you really have to ask Andy that … actually, I do feel pretty lucky that I've been able to play with three such good drummers. Christian, Andy and Scully are all great players and all in our style. We were pretty lucky to find Scully in a really short space of time and he's just great, a great guy and we’ve got a very good vibe in the band at the moment. I think we're all full of love, which is really good! 

How did you find Scully and how long did it take him to get into the Razorlight songs, as he had only a few weeks to practise?

JB: He actually had only a couple of days! It was a lot to learn because we never stick to the same set list on stage and there are three albums of material. But he’s a very clever boy and he just loved it! Before that, Scully was working in the office of our English agent. He used to play drums in various bands and one day he just came down to play with us. As a musician it’s really instinctive straight away whether you can play with somebody or not. He was great from the first moment on and it was obvious that we'd be able to sit down and really play together. As a band, especially as a rock band, and especially on stage, you can only be good if you have a great drummer! It’s absolutely true. You just can’t do it without a good drummer!

Mr. Borrell, You're in Germany on a promotional tour at the moment. How do you like Germany and how do German audiences like your new album?

Johnny Borrell: Great, really brilliant. We're actually not only playing the new album, but both albums. The shows have been great, really exciting and full of energy. We’ve all enjoyed it. Also, the sun has been shining, so we’ve been out quite a bit and have visited some art galleries. I've been looking at Kandinskys in Munich and that kind of thing.

Are you into the arts and cultural things?

JB: Well, I’m definitely into that. Of course I am!

There have been rumours again and again about RAZORLIGHT breaking up; you even did a solo project …

JB: No, I didn’t. The closest thing I ever did to a solo project was a record for “Friends Of The Earth” (http://www.foe.co.uk/) in England. I did a carbon-neutral song. I recorded it in a solar-powered studio in London. It was part of the day when I was promoting loads of carbon-efficient types of things, like electric motorcycles. It was part of a big promo day for a campaign in England called “The Big Ask”, which ended up being quite successful. It got our parliament to allow carbon-emission reductions on a year-by-year basis for the next 50 years. We're the first country in the world to have done anything of that nature. When we started that campaign it seemed completely unlikely that it would ever get through parliament. I did release a song that I wanted the record company to release as Razorlight, but they released it as Johnny Borrell instead. For the time being, that’s the only thing Johnny Borrell has ever done on his own … There have been rumours about Razorlight breaking up since 2002 for some reason …. We've switched off listening to stuff that's out there. We stopped looking at stuff like that in about 2004, but people have always said that we’re gonna break up and I guess we’re still gonna hear that.

Tell me more about the campaign please, and how you got into that.

JB: Well, I wasn’t particularly switched on to climate change. Then I went to see the Al Gore film and it completely turned me around. I left the cinema with my girlfriend and we were like – oh, shit! – We’ve got to do something, whatever we can do. I went home, turned on my computer and got on the Internet. I wanted to see what petitions I could sign. What I found was “Friends Of The Earth”, this campaign called “The Big Ask”. I liked the fact that it was a political campaign that made it a political issue. The only thing I had to do was go onto their website and click the mouse a few times. I’d always work with “Friends Of The Earth” because I thought it was such a good campaign. I was really quite involved in it and I was really amazed that it was actually a success. It was an English thing but it was pretty cool.

Where did you write the new album? Tell me about the songs.

JB: I wrote this album on an island in the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. There are about 300 people on this island. I’d been getting sort of really successful and I just wanted to get away from everything. I was in this little house in the middle of nowhere with no phone, no Internet, no central heating or anything. So I was chopping wood, breaking coal and writing songs. That took me three or four months. Basically, the album is a documentary. Everything on the album is true and real and exists. It’s about life. The title of the song “North London Trash”, for example, in which I sing about a “hard body girlfriend” (quote from the lyrics), comes from a book by Bret Easton called American Psycho, which is about a serial killer. This killer is obsessed with status and money, prestige and power. He has severe problems relating to women so he chops them up in his apartment. He reveres hard bodies, which to him are toned-up anorexic gym freaks. Now the character in my song is such a deranged character that he thinks someone like Patrick Bateman, the killer in American Psycho, is an idol. I see many people like that. It’s a song about a bumptious, egregious wannabe, a sort of motherfucker basically.

Do you have any idols of your own in the music world who influence you?

JB: At the moment I'm listening to a lot of Nick Cave, Tom Waits – that’s about it really. I particularly believe in artists who followed their creative ideas, rather than follow anything else, such as their careers, ’cause I think it’s easy to turn into the kind of artist who just chases success and hits. I’ve always admired artists who do their own thing and do it their own way. I think it’s absolutely what is necessary for an artist.

What has changed in your life since you became famous? Do people recognize you in the street?

JB: Sure. I think that’s a real pleasure. People come up to you and they say they like your music and can you sign this? And you sign it. You ask them who they are and get into their lives. That’s pretty cool. And they get into yours. But I just don’t care about the yellow press, in any way whatsoever. It concerns me about not not not not not one percent. Anyway, if somebody take some pictures, so what? I don’t think that your personal life and your state of fame or success are particularly linked. I think your personal life is just that: it’s personal!

Razorlight are very present on the Internet. Do you trust the Internet at all?

JB: I don’t know, I mean, I guess you’re finding out that there's a lot of bullshit there.
I remember about two years ago somebody showed me what myspace was, and then I saw that loads of people were pretending to be me.  On the band’s myspace site, for example, I realized that when I do reply to people personally, they never believe that it’s really me. This kind of sucks, because there's probably some kid out there who's so excited to be talking to Johnny Borrell. I put something up on our myspace site to let everyone know that I don’t have any myspace pages myself, so that if you think you're talking to me, it’s not really me. A lot of people wrote back. It was kind of weird because some people didn’t believe it was me telling them this, even though I was doing it from the main band site. There was one guy who said, “Johnny, you’re a fucking liar!” Some of the stuff you've just gotta brush off. It’s a pseudo-reality. I’d rather live my life in reality than in a pseudo-reality.

Do you have a personal goal?

JB: I don’t know. Yeah, of course! You know, actually, to tell you the truth, I don’t. I don’t know if it makes sense, a personal goal. I think you just have to live your life and move with what happens. I don’t think you can bring on things too much.

What if Razorlight don’t make it anymore? Do you have a backup?

JB: To me, just six years ago, there was a guy with a guitar and a rock’n’roll band that was pretty good and had two good songs. Today, six years later, I’m a guy with a rock’n’roll band and a bunch of songs that are pretty good. And I wanna go out and play to whoever will listen! I don’t think that’s ever gonna change!


album: Slipway Fires
out 20.02.2009