Borrell’s back... but not quite as gobby
After a 10year absence, Razorlight returnedwiththe album Olympus Sleeping at the end of last month. Full of insistent, urgent songs, it revealed a band back to what they do best and what we’d forgotten we missed.
At their height, the band and its gobby frontman Johnny Borrell headlined the Reading and Leeds festivals and The Other Stage at Glastonbury. Up All Night and the eponymously titled follow-up topped the charts.
But by the release of Slipway Fires in 2008, Razorlight were a spent force. Borrell’s solo album, Borrell 1, sank without trace and we’ve heard little from him since. Now, a little older and somewhat chastened by the music business, Johnny Borrell has returned emboldened.
‘If I could have done it any sooner, I would have. If we could choose when to write the hit songs, we would do it every day, but you can’t. You are at the mercy of the muse,’ the 38-year-old says.
Maybe only Borrell would say that with a straight face. He was a rent-a-quote staple in his pomp but he is quick to qualify his last statement in a manner that he might not have in days gone by.
‘That always sounds very pretentious in English, less so in French,’ he laughs.
‘I tried to do a Razorlight record in 2012 and it just wasn’t there. We started doing some recording and I realised, “No, this isn’t working.”
‘That’s when I went off and did Borrell 1. Then we did a 10th anniversary gig for Up All Night and that went down really well.
‘It was strange playing the old songs, but I enjoyed it and that got me thinking that I would like to do it again.’ Always among the most self-aware of this generation’s rock stars, Borrell says: ‘I’m just a cog in Razorlight but I’m maybe 70% of Razorlight. It’s who I am collaborating with, that’s the thing. Enter David.’
He gestures to David Ellis, the hirsute guitarist who began playing with Borrell last year.
‘We wrote songs not knowing if they were going to be for Razorlight or a new project,’ Ellis says.
‘The songs came about very organically because we gelled really well. When me met, we went to Paris first and the south of France and just got writing.’
‘That was my fantasy all my life,’ Borrell says. ‘As soon as the band really started working, I said to them, “Why don’t we just get into a car and drive through France and write songs?”’
When Razorlight’s star began to fade, many in the music industry were delighted.
Borrell had a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way with statements such as: ‘If you’re comparing our debuts, [Bob] Dylan’s making chips and I’m drinking champagne.’
Indeed, one of his songs, Razorchild, expresses the view
‘I said to the band, “Why don’t we just get in a car and drive through France and write songs?”’
that ‘doors that close, they don’t swing back open’. I ask if that is how it became for him and Razorlight.
‘It’s like this, I had a giant gold, shiny key that opened the door to the media and the culture of the day and then took that key and threw it into the Atlantic willingly,’ he says. ‘I had been enjoying the trapping of being bobo, as they say in French – bohemian and bourgeois – but then came a purge.
‘You have to immunise yourself from thinking, “Am I hot careerwise or not?” If you think, “Oh, I’m so hot,” then you’re just going to disappear up your own a*** but if you think the other way then you will lose confidence.’
In Johnny’s case, the latter contingency always seemed a remote one. Still, it’s good to have one of rock’s most compelling characters back in the fold.
Razorlight’s Olympus Sleeping is out now. They play the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on February 19.