Good morning!
Today we’ve got Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell telling us about what he’s been up to for the past few years and how his creative subconscious derailed his plans to sell out. Those bleeding creative subconscious’s, you just can’t trust them!
It’s a freebie because everyone, Razorlight lovers and haters, deserves to read about Johnny describing his “slick year”. Very good. We unite the people.
We’ll see you on Wednesday, enjoy the edition
Ted, Niall and Chris
PS oh you see this button here that says Subscribe Now, if you click it and pay £5 a month for full access to every edition of The New Cue then that would just be so bloody great of you, you absolute diamond. And if you don’t click it, that’s fine. But we’ll know. We’ll know.
Start The Week With… Johnny Borrell
On Friday, Razorlight release a compilation titled Razorwhat: The Best Of Razorlight. It’s part of a new lease of life for the indie-rock quartet, whose best known line-up – frontman Johnny Borrell, guitarist Björn Ågren, bassist Carl Dalemo and drummer Andy Burrows – reunited last year after a decade and more of frosty relations that went back to Burrows quitting the band in 2009.
Burrows’ departure initiated a dramatic disappearing act for a band who, like them or not, were unavoidable for large parts of the ‘00s, whether it was due to their tunes (Golden Touch, America, Somewhere Else, their between-albums hit that’s a very good song despite the lines “I met a girl / she asked me my name / I told her what it was”) or because Johnny had done something silly.
I (hello, this is Niall here) interviewed the band a few times as a young music journalist and hung out with them even more. I was in a band myself and although we weren’t very good, Razorlight’s manager and my personal hero Roger Morton took a liking to us and started managing us too. Razorlight doing well was great for us - we dubbed ourselves “Razorlight’s tax loss”. We played a lot of shows with them and to see a band blow up huge like that from close quarters was quite the spectacle. Johnny was a great frontman too, whatever size the venue. I saw him entertain a crowd of about 15 in Austin, Texas in exactly the same manner that he did headlining Royal Albert Hall not long after, the only difference being that rather than clambering over a bar whilst singing with his top off, he was clambering through royal boxes whilst singing with his top off.
You could tell Johnny was desperate for this thing he’d created to be huge, like U2-huge, and it was happening. And then it wasn’t happening. After Andy left, Razorlight ebbed away in a shockingly undramatic, unRazorlight-y fashion. Johnny went off and lived in France and made some very odd solo records, going from headlining Reading to playing Notting Hill Arts Club just a few years later. Whilst peers such as The Kooks and The Wombats found fresh levels of success after streaming introduced them to a new generation of fans, Razorlight were ‘00s indie’s forgotten men.
It's something they seem to be belatedly trying to rectify with this new best of. It contains a couple of very good new songs, and there’s a big UK tour planned for next year and the possibility of a new record too. I hadn’t seen Johnny in about 15 years – I mean, no-one had really – but not long ago, I sat down with him in the bar of a hotel near King’s Cross to find out what the hell he’s been doing in the meantime and more.
If you were going for a job, any prospective employer would want to know about this huge gap on your CV. Talk me through it…
A huge gap! I have to talk myself through it. I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and I’m like, ‘yeah, I just stopped, didn’t I?’. What did happen? There were a number of factors. One was Andy leaving the band, which was like hammering a nail into a tree, it was slowly killing everything and the only thing I thought I could do at that time was carry on, just keep going, and it wasn’t really working. I was writing stuff and I was like, ‘well, I wrote Up All Night without Andy, I know I’m a writer, I can do this’. I really needed some support from the label, I remember at the time we did this one song just after Andy left called Double Dumb, it was a really good song, it wasn’t going to be a number one hit but it was a really good song, just like, ‘let’s keep the band alive, let’s keep releasing’, but the label didn’t want to put it out, they were like, ‘until you write the next America, we’re not putting anything out’.
Where did that leave you mentally?
I didn’t question it because I really trusted our A&R man, he was a constant throughout our career. I looked in a diary that I had from 2008 where I’d written down what he’d said to me about Slipway Fires. He said, “you just need to make a record that appeals to everyone from the Pitchfork blog – it was a blog back then – to the edgy kids to the mums listening along on Heart FM”, and I took it in my stride, like ‘sure, sure, I’ll go and do that’. I look back on it now like, ‘what the fuck are you talking about?!’.
That is quite an insane demand, why did you take it in your stride?
I had a ‘just get on with it’ mentality, like you never stopped to ask yourself how you were feeling, just fucking do it, just keep going, do it, do it. So we got into this thing with the label and it was getting annoying, because (a) I don’t want to do a ballad right now and (b) this band just needs to carry on and if we’re waiting for another golden egg, one might come but it might not come. It’s not like The Killers were putting out golden material on album four either. The thing I didn’t want to do was just hand in my homework to Radio 1 and be like ‘here’s another piece of shit and you’re gonna play it because of the name’, I didn’t wanna do that, I only wanted to do it when it was right. But the stuff that we did just after Andy left, I felt like ‘this is right and it’s a good track and it’s come from my heart’, but they didn’t want to put it out. Then everything just started to fall apart for me.
How did that manifest?
Well, I had this amazing idea that I was gonna sell out. Now, this worked incredibly well for me cos I had this brilliant idea. I was going out with Edie [Campbell, model] from this West London family and hanging out in these really posh circles, these people who are vastly wealthy, and my normal was changing, I’m like, ‘oh yeah, Hugh Grant is here for breakfast, whatever’, all that kind of stuff. So my normal starts changing, my baseline, I’m losing touch with anything that seems a reality I would’ve known at that point in my life and we’re getting paid to go to museum openings and stuff like that, paid to drink champagne.
A long way from Dalston.
A long way from everywhere! Then I had this great idea: I’m gonna get my teeth fixed, I’m gonna cut my hair and I’m gonna be a slick guy, this is gonna be great! My slick year. We’re going out to these art symposiums in St Petersburg and shit and going to the opera and doing all this stuff and I’m like, ‘I’m gonna sell Razorlight out, this is gonna be great’ and I’m listening to the people around me, who are like ‘no-one gives a shit who the other guys are in Razorlight, Razorlight is Johnny Borrell, like Coldplay is Chris Martin’, and I’m like, ‘OK, yeah’, yeah, so I said to Björn and Carl, ‘this isn’t working’, and it wasn’t, Björn was going through a lot of anxiety and just wasn’t playing very well and Carl was sulking as usual and I said, “guys, leave the band if you don’t enjoy it, I’ll do it myself,” so we did that and here I am, I’ve bought the name, I’ve got the band, I’ve got my slick life, I’ve got a Range Rover, it’s all fucking lined up, I’ve got the model girlfriend. So now it’s time to sell it out, I’ll try making some shit and send it to Radio 1 and see what happens.
I’m driving down the road and thinking, ‘wow, I’m 30 years old, I’ve got no family, no mortgage, no ties on me, no demands, I’m totally free, no responsibility, none’ and I think my creative unconscious came and grabbed me and went, ‘there’s no way you’re gonna fucking sell out anything, cos that’s not how it works for you’, and that was when I put together the band to make my first solo record, which was the least sell-out record anyone could ever make in the whole world, eclipsed only by my second solo record, which was even more the least commercial record anyone could ever make, and gave everything up.
There was definitely no America on either of your two solo records.
I gave up everything in that moment, I stopped doing Razorlight. My conscious mind had said, ‘yeah, let’s set this all up to do it’ and my creative unconscious just dragged me into this world of amazing artistic fulfilment and creative fulfilment and adventure.
When did the Razorlight voice begin piping up again?
I just blanked it. I didn’t think about it. We did a ten-year anniversary of Up All Night and I remember thinking, ‘oh yeah, that’s kind of cool,’ now back to my thing…. But that’s why I stopped Razorlight. I was trying to go and do this thing, let’s go for mega success, The Killers model, which I’ve always respected Brandon for and I’m not dissing him, he’s always made good music even when they’re going for the mega thing, so that was it, I went into this total another adventure.
It was a very surprising diversion for anyone who knew you, I always thought you just wanted to be a huge star.
I couldn’t take it on. For about a year after Andy left, if the label had supported me, the band would’ve carried on. But because they didn’t, that door closed. Back then, the labels were so powerful as well because if it was now, you’d just be like, ‘fuck you, I’ll put it out anyway’.
In that time away, did you ever bump into your songs?
Not really, I was living like a farmer in the Basque country. I’d hear America sometimes in the shop and be like, ‘oh yeah, that’s America, it’s everywhere, it’s like toothpaste’.
Take me back to the start. What did you have in your head when you formed Razorlight?
The main thing was that I wanted to make a gig that I didn’t think I was boring. I got so bored of watching bands. I tried to write a set of songs that I thought wouldn’t be boring, that had enough dynamics in them. My personal thing about a lot of modern music is that there’s no dynamics in it, I wanted songs that speed up and slow down and stop and I want some that start quiet and stay quiet and then go really big.
I listened to Up All Night again recently and I was surprised how intricate a lot of it sounds, I think my main takeaway at the time was just that it had a load of indie bangers on it.
I listened to Which Way Is Out last night. I’m so pleased it still works because it’s so euphoric when it finally goes ‘which way’s out’ and the distorted guitars come in, the release, but you need that minute and a half of fucking with you to get that release.
The other thing that was going through my brain a lot was the crazy adventure that Peter and Carlos were on with The Libertines. We were so close and then suddenly they were on the front cover of the NME and signed by Rough Trade. I was so thrilled for them, until everyone else starting liking them and then it was like, ‘oh’. It was right up until the Kate Moss thing where it went really tabloid. A lot of Up All Night was written on my way back from the Albion Rooms, Which Way Is Out definitely was.
There’s a lot of yearning on your debut too.
There is. I had a massively important break up in about 2000/2001 and I was thinking a lot about that.
You had an insane fuel to you, you were so determined.
It was a triple thing because a really good friend of mine who was in a band had died in a car crash, his whole band died, and I remember thinking, ‘what the fuck,’ and if they were here they’d be wanting to make music, they were 19/20, so I didn’t want to sit down. Every time I sat down I felt guilty, like, ‘you’re here, you’re alive, work! You’ve been given this opportunity, your friends aren’t here and didn’t get this opportunity’, then my other bunch of friends are getting anointed as punk rock superstars, so yeah, there was this massive drive.
When you think back to that period of huge success and Number Ones, what comes to mind first?
A lot of alienation because the relationships in the band were so bad. It was really bad. I was really happy in my personal life and with my girlfriend, I was feeling like I was in the prime of my life, I’d been partying and doing drugs for the past few years and I’d cleaned up and put out this great record, and I just wanted to be friends with everybody and was like, ‘why am I not friends with everybody?’ I’d done the brat thing and then I’d sit down with journalists and be like, ‘yeah, that’s done, now we’re on this page,’ and they’d still be writing the brat story and I’d be like, ‘this is so annoying’. Same within the band, it was just so alienating. I just went into my own thing.
Which Razorlight song means the most to you?
Golden Touch. It still surprises me, there’s so many double ways you could take the lyrics, 20 years later I’ll sing it and go, ‘oh, did I mean it that way round or that way round?’, and I still don’t know. I love that song. Songs can connect in different ways. You can have a big hit but sometimes big hits, it’s like ideology, everyone knows it’s a hit and it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone likes it, everyone believes that at least five other people like it so they like it as well, but something like Golden Touch I know people like and I know it connects with people. It’s a real thing, I’m genuinely talking to someone in the song and that comes through. I’ve had points, say towards the end of the ‘00s where I’d go and play a thing and Razorlight were getting a lot of shit and I would walk into difficult rooms, I was hanging out with Noel Fielding, and I’d get up and play Golden Touch and everyone is fucking singing it. It’s always a massive song for me.
What does the future hold for Razorlight ?
I think our best single is one we haven’t done yet. Hopefully we’ll do the greatest hits and get more music out next year, then tour in the spring. It’s gonna be interesting. That’s all I can say.
ND