Songs in the key of knife

Strolling across the lobby of Dublin’s Morrison Hotel, Johnny Borrell seems to have left his ego on the tour bus.

Six months ago you and Johnny chatted briefly on the phone, a perfunctory natter the Razorlight singer has long since forgotten. Yet he acts as if you are lifelong chums. Settling into a chair, Johnny doesn’t want to talk about himself. He wants to talk about you.
“I’m good man, but how the hell are you?” asks Borrell, flicking wisps of fringe from his eyes. A twitchy character, he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Great! I’m doing okay, too. Running late, though, running late. I’ve just been helping my assistant. Her bags have gone missing. We're trying to find them, but they could be anywhere. So now I’m my assistant’s assistant. Ha!”
If Borrell is a tosser – and his press clippings argue the case persuasively – he hides it rather well. “I don’t recognise myself when I read those interviews,” says Borrell. “To begin with, I don’t look at the tabloids at all. So I’ve absolutely no idea what they’re saying about me. But even stuff in the broadsheets and the music press – I look at them and don’t recognise any of the stuff I’m supposed to be saying. The only exception was a piece I wrote about carbon emissions for The [UK] Independent. I knew those were my words because I had written them.”
Lately, of course, Razorlight have been chest deep in scandal. Ten days previously, Borrell is reported to have punched the band’s Swedish-born bassist Carl Dalemo on stage in Lyon. Not for the first time, there was talk of a break-up (in 2004, Razorlight nearly split: ironically after the rest of the group allegedly had enough of Borrell’s hard partying ways). Borrell, however, insists morale has never been higher.
“It’s great man, great. I didn’t see any of the coverage so I don’t know what people were saying. But if Carl is going to spend the whole day drinking in an Irish pub in Lyon and is a mess for the show, then I think it’s fair enough to put some manners on him.”
People paint Borrell as a boor and an egoist, he says, because it makes for good headlines. “You know, just the other day a journalist said to me, ‘You’re not interested in a career, are you? You’re not like all those other bands.’ And then, another journalist said that we were this careerist group whose only interest was cracking America. I’ve seen myself described as ugly, as good looking: my voice has been described as high, as low.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know who all these journalists are writing about, but it’s not me. “
One thing at least is clear: Borrell’s not much bothered what anyone thinks of him. Ask him if he worries people that might be cynical about his campaigning on behalf of Greenpeace and he sits there blinking. The thought had never previously occurred. Now that it does, he discounts immediately.
“I’m not pretending to be pure about this,” he says. ‘After all, even if every single person in the world was to personally reduce their own carbon footprint by the maximum possible amount, there would still be huge problem that only governments can deal with. But I try. If I’m leaving the house I’ll switch the telly off. If I’m going down to do an interview, I’ll make sure the light in my hotel room is off.”
As Razorlight’s main songwriter, Borrell is credited with shaping the band’s slick, aspirational sound, as tweaked to perfection on last year's Razorlight LP. The truth is more complicated: “Take a song like [number one single] ‘In America’ – I wrote that on an acoustic guitar. However, it didn’t become a Razorlight song until the rest of the band played on it,” he says. “Before that, it had been inert. Razorlight wouldn’t be the band it is without me, but you can say the same for everyone else in the band.”
Does he believe there is such a thing as the perfect song? “Well, I’m always trying to write it,” he says, laughing. “I suppose you think every song is perfect when you write it. But it’s really up to other people to judge how good or band something is. As the writer, you’re too close to it to be able to say.”
This afternoon , Borrell is sipping mineral water. He wasn’t always so chaste. A tear-away since his early teens, Borrell grew up in the middle class north London, attending Highgate prep school (alumni include Zak ‘son of Ringo’ Starkey, Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker and UK politician Charles Clarke). Initially, Borrell was a quintessentially suburban rebel: he would skips classes to watch cricket at nearby Lords “with a can of special brew in my hands.”
By the time he was 15, though, things had taken a turn for the sinister. Borrell was using LSD and spending the nights in squats. Soon afterwards, he fell into the orbit of Pete Doherty and Carl Barat. While Borrell was never formally a member of The Libertines, he was closely associated with the group during their early years. At the time, however, music was the last thing on his mind. Semi-homeless and strung out on drugs, he seemed bent on self destruction . “It was a bad time, sure,” he recalls. “ I saw a lot of bad things. It made me appreciate life.”
While reluctant to be drawn on his relationship with Doherty, Borrell does agree that the Babyshambles frontman has started play up to his media caricature: “I think it is true to say that Pete has tried to become this person we see in the tabloids and that’s such a tragedy. Because you’ve got to be able to distinguish between real life and what the newspapers write. Real life is being up on stage and hearing thousands of people sing your songs back to you. Everything else is just bullshit.”
Razorlight play the Oxegen festival, held at Punchestown, Kildare July 7 & 8. Razorlight is out now