Having experienced all the excesses of rock superstardom, British singer Johnny Borrell seems to have come full circle. To return to a fruitful headspace, the Razorlight frontman escaped to a remote Scottish island recreating the living conditions that led to his band becoming a multi-million selling rock band. Borrell spoke exclusively to Nick Milligan about Slipway Fires, Razorlight’s stunning new album.
Razorlight are finally coming to Australia! What’s taken you so long?
Yeah, it’s really cool! It’s only taken us about… five years? I’m really excited. We’ve wanted to play the Big Day Out but they’ve never offered us a spot. I went to Australia a couple of years ago. I went to Melbourne to watch the cricket, which was a mistake on my part as I saw a fairly abject display by the English team. Then I looked around for a week with my girlfriend, which annoyed me even more that we hadn’t played there, so I’m really glad that we’re finally coming.
The opening track of Slipway Fires, ‘Wire To Wire’, quickly indicated that this new record is very different to your first two. Did you see Slipway Fires as an opportunity to change the way that people think of Razorlight?
Probably, but I think we were also trying to change the way that we thought about Razorlight – or we felt Razorlight had changed. It wasn’t a conscious effort to change, but our relationship with what Razorlight was had changed. [We all] wanted something different out of it. Our first two albums were quite straight forward – we were looking at a mountain and trying to climb it. On this one we got near the top and we were looking around and went, ‘Right, let’s go explore what’s here.’
I also felt that on the first album (Up All Night) I was really talking to the people around me. On the second (Razorlight), I was talking to everyone at once, in very broad strokes. On [Slipway Fires] I wanted to get back to communicating with the people in my life. The songs on the first album were quite short, like sending a text message. But [Slipway Fires] feels more like writing letters to someone.
You went to a remote Scottish island called Tiree to write a lot of this album – why did you seek isolation?
I’d been on tour for 18 months and I’d been in Razorlight for four years without stopping. A lot has happened. I’ve gone through a lot and learned a hell of a lot. I think I needed to get away and find space and time, and I didn’t feel I could get that in London. Plus, there were things that had happened in the past four to five years that I hadn’t stopped to think about. There was only time to do, rather than time to wonder why.
I always felt the best conditions for writing rock ‘n’ roll are to be on the dole in England in a major city, because you’ve got just enough money that you can only go out once or twice a week and not be totally destitute, but skint enough that you stay inside because you can’t ask your mates for two quid to get the bus everyday. It’s the right gestation temperature, because it gives you about four days indoors on your own with nothing else to do but write music. Maybe going to Tiree was an artificial way of giving myself those four days a week where there’s nothing to do but write, which is perfect.
Going to Tiree was just a random thing. I needed to find somebody that had a house in the middle of nowhere and a friend of a friend said yes. I went up there and I had no idea where I was going. I had a map to this tiny island with only 300 people on it. I was there for three months, but I had to pop out once or twice. I went to a party for (supermodel) Natalia Vodianova in Moscow. The contrast between being on a Herbridian island with 300 people and then sipping champagne and eating caviar in Moscow was pretty amazing (laughs). To go from chopping wood, lugging coal and staring cows in the face…
What was the band’s initial reaction to the material that you brought back with you?
In a way, Andy [Burrows, drummer] started the ball rolling, because I just went away and said, ‘I’m getting away to write,’ and the band asked, ‘Are you going to write the album?’ and I really didn’t know. I don’t want to make music unless it feels worthwhile, because I don’t want to be a part of the problem – I don’t want to be clogging the airwaves with shit. I went away and I wasn’t sure if I was writing songs, or what. Andy sent up the song ‘Stinger’, which he wrote. I thought, ‘God, that’s a brilliant song!’ It was a real call-to-arms, because I was like, ‘Alright, I’ve got to get writing, otherwise I’m not going to have any songs on this album if Andy keeps going.’
There was no mobile reception or internet, so I wasn’t in communication. So I would drive down to the town where I could get one bar of signal (on my mobile) and fire a text off to Andy with a couple of lines that I’d written, if I was really proud of them. When I got back (from Tiree), I just started playing with Andy. I wasn’t sure which songs were Razorlight songs – if any of them where. But Andy and I would sit down with a cup of tea, figure some things out and then take it to the rest of the band.
A song that I loved the first time I heard it was ’60 Thompson’. What can you tell me about how that song was written?
It was written in an interesting way. We were doing an awards ceremony and Andy came up to me, strumming his guitar, singing, ‘Behind your barricades, there’s a love that can be made…’ I was like, ‘Yeah, winner!’ That was a long time ago and it was always in my mind. I knew it was a great chorus and I just had to write the verses for it. That chorus is Andy’s, though I wrote the final line, ‘Where true arrows seldom stray.’ A lot of people that I care about like that song, so that always means something. It’s an economy of words – I was trying to tell more of a story with less words.
Do you feel your lyrics on this album are a lot more direct compared to others?
Yeah, definitely in places. A lot of the songs on this record started off on the page. That’s not always how it goes. On the second album the lyrics were mostly all written at the microphone – the band get going, you feel good and you just sing something. If anyone could be bothered to read the lyrics and count the syllables, they’re all written in quite a strict meter. Which is quite weird for songwriting, but that’s how it came together. I was writing them before I sang them. Even the cynical observational stuff like ‘Burberry Blues Eyes’ is quite strictly written, but I was just having fun with words, you know?
On a lot of the songs your voice is so prominent – was it an early intention to push yourself vocally or was it just what the material required?
The more you tour and the more you sing, your voice is going to change. You’re in constant training. You’re like a footballer or a race horse – your voice gets stronger and stronger. I didn’t think about it at all. I thought about it on ‘Burberry Blues Eyes’ because it’s quite a tough one to sing, actually.
Working with (producer) Mike Crossey, we really thought about how to record the voice and the acoustics. Mike engineered the Johnny Cash stuff, so that sound was a starting point. It helps if you’ve got Johnny Cash on the microphone, but hopefully the vocals sound good.
What would you have thought of Slipway Fires if someone had played it to you back in 2002 when Razorlight were emerging?
That’s a brilliant question… a brilliant question. That is the kind of thing you ask yourself. It can go in the other direction as well – if I made Up All Night today, would I be happy with it? If I would have liked Slipway Fires back then, it would all depend on whether I could believe in the singer or not. If I thought he was a fake, I would see through it. If I felt he meant it, I would think he was amazing. I obviously believe in myself, so I think back then I would have have believed in the guy singing. It’s a great question.
Was there a lot of material written that didn’t make this record?
Yeah… there were a few things. What we tried to do, once we had worked out what all the songs were, we went into the studio with 11 songs and we almost had them in order. We wrote them up on the board in the order we felt they should be on the album. It had a coherence as an album. There was a song called ‘Frequency’ and when we started off we thought it would be the lead single, and it ended up not even making the album.
The weird thing about this record is that I feel like its been a clearing. It feels like we’ve cleared the decks and set the clocks back to zero. We feel very free. I think radio is starting to become antiquated with bands that put an album out, tour for two years, put another album out then tour again. I think I’d like to have records coming out more regularly, because I’m not sure [that cycle] fits with the world these days.
Was it a difficult decision to choose ‘Wire To Wire’ as the first single or was it clear from the beginning?
It was never a clear first single at all, and I didn’t even think of it as a single in the slightest. It was going to be Track Two and it was going to be much shorter, but we recorded it and it was a crazy recording. Everything’s live – all of us in the room. It sounds exactly as it was on the day. We started getting phone calls from people all over the world saying, ‘Fuckin’ hell, that’s a smash!’
It’s a strange single to lead with, in a lot of ways. But fuck, I hope the singles we put out off this album make people think, ‘That doesn’t sound like anything else on the radio.’ That’s the road that always ruins bands. You can be really good and have heaps of number one singles, but if you keep chasing that, it starts to ruin you. Every band that stays at the top, in terms of every time they put something out it goes to number one and they play stadiums, can find their success being to the detriment of their music. That’s a race I really don’t want to be involved in.
Razorlight play the V Festival on Saturday March 28, 2009, at Centennial Park in Sydney. Slipway Fires is available now through Universal.
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