Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell: ‘Rock’n’roll is an endangered species’

“Success just ate us,” says Johnny Borrell, “because it was so f------ successful.” The singer of Razorlight – tumbling curls, denim shirt, red and blue boxing boots – is in a north London pub, talking about what the hell happened to his band after the release of their multi-platinum-selling second album, Razorlight.

It was summer 2006, and the flawless run of singles that had given them a top 10 hit with Golden Touch a year earlier would soon include a number one, America, co-written by Borrell and drummer Andy Burrows. Within the year, Borrell would be on the cover of Vogue, dating movie-star Kirsten Dunst, and the band would be headlining Reading Festival. But privately, and publicly, Razorlight were imploding.

After a performance at the Live Music Awards, with America still topping the charts, the band pitched up at the epicentre of the Noughties indie scene, The Hawley Arms in Camden, where on any given night, you might see Liam Gallagher, Kate Moss, or assorted Libertines, while regulars Amy Winehouse, Noel Fielding or Borrell pulled pints behind the bar.

On that night, Burrows was winding Borrell up about their latest hit, how he hadn’t initially seen it as one for the band. “I think we were both pretty drunk,” Borrell says. “And I said, ‘I’m really p----d off, can you drop that?’… and he still said it three or four times, and I think I said, ‘If you keep saying that to me, something bad’s gonna happen’ and he did.”

“He punched me in the face and did quite an impressive jump over the bar and disappeared,” recalls Burrows, picking up the story later. “I was being an annoying little d---head really.” But the internal tensions were real, and a group therapy session hadn’t helped. There would be an onstage spat between Borrell and Swedish bassist Carl Dalemo at a gig in France. And when the going got unexpectedly tough – the band’s third album, 2008’s Slipway Fires, entered the chart at number four, then sank without trace – Razorlight were clearly on borrowed time. Burrows quit in 2009, and was followed out of the door by Dalemo and the band’s talented lead guitarist, fellow Swede Björn Ågren, in 2011.

The singer ploughed on alone, releasing the unheralded Borrell 1 in 2013, and an admired Razorlight album, Olympus Sleeping, with an all-new band, in 2018. Burrows drummed with We Are Scientists and put his melodic gifts into solo albums and collaborations with, among others, Ricky Gervais (he played in David Brent’s band Foregone Conclusion and wrote the score for both series of After Life) and composed soundtracks such as The Snowman and the Snowdog.

Now, the classic line-up has been restored for a Best of album, Razorwhat?, which has two new songs, including poppy single You Are Entering the Human Heart, and the tougher, rockier Violence Forever, both of which sit comfortably alongside the hits, and suggest the band is far from done. An arena tour will follow in 2023.

But as the recently released feature-length documentary Razorlight: Fall to Pieces reveals, putting the band back together was no easy task. Dalemo and Ågren were open to a reunion but the emotional obstacle of the Borrell-Burrows break-up was significant. Both are now in their early 40s, and they hadn’t spoken for 11 years. Burrows admits that without the efforts of the documentary maker Ben Lowe and Razorlight manager Roger Morton, a meeting between the pair at Borrell’s house in the south of France may never have happened.

“I was really scared about going to see him,” Burrows tells me. “I was also really nervous about the fact that he seemed to lay quite a lot of the reasoning behind us splitting up on me and what he’s described as addiction.” This was key: Borrell blamed the split on alcohol; he’d been through his own drug problems but saw booze as a wrecking ball. “I’d probably done about 19 tabs of LSD before my 15th birthday,” he tells me. “And by the time I was 18, I’d been doing heroin for two years, so I’m pretty grounded in drug abuse. But alcoholism is a different beast.”

Burrows had left telling Borrell he couldn’t “drink his way around the world again”. Borrell took this to mean: “to be in the band I need to drink… and I’m drinking so much I’m putting my health at risk”. But Burrows says he was not an alcoholic and only blamed alcohol as an excuse to mask his feelings. “I couldn’t deal with the relationships within the band and the relentless, endless touring and being away from home,” he says. He and his partner had a new baby, and “just shutting the door to leave was hard enough”.

But the idea of a reunion excited both. “I drove around in my car for a couple of weeks, remembering that I was in a big band, you know,” Burrows says. “I would start doing embarrassing things like putting Golden Touch on for my 14-year-old daughter and be like, ‘yeah, see, Dad’s cool.’” (He and his wife now have a six year-old too.) There’s a sweet, self-deprecating quality to Burrows that makes it easy to understand why he’s a natural collaborator; a driven intensity to Borrell that makes him the obvious focal point. Burrows describes him as “a born rock and roll star… he just lives and breathes it. It feels like he’s from another time.”

In a sense, he is. In an interview a few years ago, he talked about how some of the characters who shaped the sound of British indie music in the Noughties could have been found sitting in a room together in northeast London in 1999 “with no mobile phones, no internet, obsessed with music… listening to Exile on Main Street over and over again, going out and shoplifting bottles of red wine, looking like nobody else, and not giving a f---.” They were Borrell, Pete Doherty, two other members of The Libertines, and the DJ Mairead Nash.

“It was a very, very different time,” he says, comparing it to the Instagram age, when a recording contract can depend on how many TikTok followers you have. When Borrell began making music, “the idea of taking your own photo, and showing it to somebody else would have been the least cool thing you could ever do,” he says.

The mythology that intertwines the destinies of Borrell and Doherty runs deep. “I was there the first time Pete smoked crack, I think, and that was the last time we ever hung out,” he tells me. “When he signed an indie deal to do a single, it was like, from that moment, he invented this Pete Doherty character… because when I met him, he was riding a bicycle, wearing a duffle coat and listening to Belle and Sebastian, and he’d come round, he’d watch me and John Hassell [bassist of The Libertines and Borrell’s close friend] doing heroin and be like, ‘What are you doing? You don’t want to do that.’

“And as soon as he got the deal, I remember I saw him, and he had this kind of strange swagger… and he started hanging out and doing heroin with some of the guys that John and I had been doing it with in years previously… I’d been clean for about four years by then, so I was like, I’m never going back there. But I went around there one night, and they’d got some crack in… And I was like, when did you start doing this? And he invented this story: ‘The coke dealer ran out of coke, so all he had left was crack, and it’s kind of the same thing, so we’re just doing that now.’ And I was like, ‘You’re one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, that’s not one of the most intelligent things I’ve ever heard.’ And I said, ‘Look, I’m out of here, dude.’ And he lent me 20 quid for the taxi… I should pay him back.”

The relationship had fallen away by the time Doherty headbutted Borrell backstage at the Leeds Festival in 2005. By now Razorlight’s debut album Up All Night had gone platinum (Rolling Stone called it “a brilliant mod explosion of scruffy pub punk”), they’d headlined the Other Stage at Glastonbury, and Borrell was hot news, while Doherty had spent a month in prison for burgling his bandmate’s flat, left The Libertines to start Babyshambles, and was in and out of the tabloids as he was repeat-dumped by Kate Moss over his crack habit. “That was a real sucker punch out of the blue,” Borrell tells me. “We were just standing there talking – ask Dave Grohl, or Caleb from Kings of Leon, they were right next to me. [Pete] went into a room with Alan Wass, who died [in 2015, of a heart attack], and smoked crack for about two hours. And came out like that. And he came up to me and I was talking to him, sort of polite, and then suddenly rage flickered across his face. And he just went in to headbutt me, I moved back, he just caught me there…” (he touches just below his right eye) “… and then he wanted to fight. He was like, ‘go on, what about your boxing?’ That kind of stuff. And I was like, I’m not gonna fight you, Pete. Dude, I wish you the best.”

Borrell was rapidly becoming tabloid fodder himself. He’d already adopted the all-white look that people still associate with him – a former girlfriend had told him if he wanted to be noticed he had to wear the same thing every day for a year; he’d planned to wear white jeans with a baby blue Van Morrison T-shirt he’d made himself, he tells me, but then lost the T-shirt a few days later and opted for a white one instead. When he wasn’t going bare-chested on stage, that is. And he was still catching flak from an infamous 2004 NME interview in which he’d declared: “Firstly I’m a genius, musically, culturally, everything”; and “I’m the greatest songwriter of my generation”; and “Well, put it this way, compared to the Razorlight album, Dylan is making the chips, I’m drinking the champagne.”

“I wrote 12 quotes out on a piece of paper,” he recalls, “just thinking, what are the 12 most provocative things I could say. And I thought, I’ll probably use one or two of them, but the interview wasn't really going anywhere, so I just thought, ‘F--- it. And I just got out all 12… And that went pretty well, in the sense that it certainly made a bit of a stir. An Irish mate phoned me up after it and said, ‘I just got a call from Oscar Wilde. He’s p----- off that you didn’t compare yourself to him as well.’”

“It was kind of exciting because I was like, what a brilliant thing. I’ve invented this character who’s super cool, and I was trying to be that character for about six months, which was fun, but also there were times where I’d walk out of places, and be like, ‘what did I just say? I just called that person a c---,’ and everyone gasped, it was pretty ballsy, I felt like Cyrano de Bergerac to an extent, but also, ‘why did I just do that? I could still be in that party having a good time if I’d just been nice to everyone, but now I’m walking down the street.’”

The pressure was already mounting by the time the band toured the US in 2005. Borrell remembers the New York Times had sent a journalist to “follow me around New York as I was making mayhem for two or three days. And so she sort of tagged along with me, while I basically did nothing, I was going on a few dates with girls. And then I think the New York Times realised there was no juice in this story, so they got her to take me and Andy to a strip club… There was this strange tension, I just didn’t know what the Americans wanted… did they want some Mötley Crüe-style excess? And the owner was getting quite annoyed with me because he’s like, you know, ‘what’s the matter with you, don’t you like girls?’… And there’s nothing erotic going on for me, you know, silicone stuff is not my thing. It was a weird time. But I did think I was big s---.”

When the tour got to Denver, though, Borrell walked off stage after five songs telling the audience he felt like killing himself. “I was feeling extremely alienated,” he recalls. “We were on this bus for about two days, I can’t remember what drugs I was doing, but I was doing a lot. I think I was just trying to break out of everything. I had this thing where if anyone asked me how I was feeling, at that point in my life, I’d just stare at them like, ‘what the f--- are you talking about? We’re here to get on with this’… So to break that wall and just go, like, ‘I can’t do this.’ It was huge for me.”

It wasn’t long, though, before the Guardian was calling him “the most hated man in pop”; it still irritates him, especially as the line was added by a sub-editor. “I don’t even know who wrote it. It’s literally like a little stab in the dark.” And by 2007, Borrell was worrying that the success of the second album, with songs like In the Morning about those early trashy years when “You’d lose yourself/ In the morning, you know he won’t remember a thing” had turned the band from indie rebels into the High Street. But the music industry loved them. “We were like their dream band, because we were successful, but we also had a bit of edge. And there was suddenly these like, copycat bands. I got back [from a world tour] and I took Kirsten Dunst to watch the cricket at Lord’s – like anyone would – and Rank Studios is right in St John’s Wood… so I was like, ‘d’you mind if I park my scooter here?’, and there was this band called One Night Only with George Craig that was in, with the same producer we had, in the same studio, with the same label, doing their album. And he was like 16. It was so weird, I was like, ‘why don’t you just call me up and I’ll write the songs as well?’”

The commercial failure of Slipway Fires, though, came with an added frustration. Borrell had written songs such as North London Trash, which poked fun at his arrogant, self-aggrandising tabloid image, but people took lines, such as “I’ve got a hot body girlfriend/ I’ve got a wallet full of cash” at face value. “There’s a great Andrew Loog Oldham line about that,” he laughs, “to the effect that nuanced irony is not something that you’re gonna get across in the three minutes allotted to you in the pop world.”

Yet both Borrell and Burrows made it out of a scene that claimed high-profile casualties. Doherty only swapped his heroin and crack habit for life in rural France in 2019, Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning in 2011. Both men remember her fondly from the Camden days. “It’s just devastatingly sad,” says Burrows. “We all know she was an immense talent. But I used to see Amy all the time when we all lived within fairly close proximity of each other, and she was always such a kind, lovely, and extremely funny girl to be around.”

“She was always very light, she kinda had this brightness to her,” Borrell says. “Watching her get each tattoo was like, almost every week, there was another tattoo, and you could see this sort of transformation…”

“When you’re in rock and roll, and you’re doing well, you can always find a bunch of people that are going to sort of back-up what you’re doing and say that’s cool,” he adds. “And one of the problems when you get into drugs and alcohol in a serious way is people are applauding it, you know. And that’s something I think about with Pete, as well. We used to play in Filthy McNasty’s in Islington – I mean, Pete used to work there, and we spent a lot of time there. And it was part owned by Shane MacGowan. And Shane used to come to the pub every so often reeking of p---, with like, a crow in his pocket and that kind of stuff. And everyone would want to do a line with Shane and have a pint with Shane, because, wow, we just went and did a line in the toilet with Shane MacGowan, what a story. And it’s interesting how Pete, at points, has become that character. And I think Amy did as well, you know, so you’re in that thing where it’s like, the more f----- up you get, the more people come along, and go, yeah, that’s great. Which is dangerous.”

Razorlight’s reunion offers the band a chance to reset and perhaps make the record they could have made in 2007, yet both men are aware that rock music has changed in the years since then. “It’s starting to feel like a museum,” says Borrell. “Playing rock and roll in the way that I see it, which is not with computers… it’s a completely endangered species. They invite you on the radio and it’s sort of like, is this a special heritage day? I mean, like, am I here today to represent the guy who actually plays an instrument.”

Borrell cherishes the way that a single guitar note played by Jimi Hendrix or Keith Richards, or a Stewart Copeland drum fill is instantly recognisable. “But the recording process at the moment, and this goes for almost everyone, almost irrespective of genre, is, you know, ‘let’s do one for radio’. But the one that is for radio now is just so formulaic. Whether the drummer plays it or not, they’re all playing the same beat, it’s been cut to the grid. It sounds exactly the same as every other one.”

He insists he’d rather hear an iPhone recording of The 1975 rehearsing than a finished record. “It’s the same for everyone, Coldplay, whatever, I’d rather just hear the last rehearsal they did before they went into the studio than the one that’s been all polished.”

He finds inspiration in the sound of a group of people in a room playing together. “I love hearing the identity of the drummer, and especially playing with Andy, who is one of the best drummers – you want to hear that guy on the record.”

Have they got another America in them? “Oh, hell yeah,” says Burrows. “I think we’re just getting going… that's why I think it’s important for us to try and preserve this relationship second time around.”

'Razorwhat? The Best of Razorlight' is released on December 9