For all Johnny’s lofty poetic ambitions, it works in its simplicity.
‘Vice’, meanwhile, is their best track yet: Johnny’s voice yelping through a climax that could tingle the coldest spine (“Sometimes you fall/Into the arms of/No-one at all”). ‘In The City’ feels way more epic than its five minutes may suggest, working itself up into something so frenzied we forgive it for ripping garage standard ‘Gloria’ wholesale. The good news is that Razorlight see the need for filler like The Datsuns see the need for Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason. And do you know what? These re-recorded versions sound even better. The singles we already know – the punkoid jitters of ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Lies’, ‘Rip It Up”s two-minute demand to remain on every indie-club playlist for the next ten years and, of course, the Midas-magic of ‘Golden Touch’. For all its flaws, ‘Up All Night’ bristles with passion, energy and, most importantly, amazing songs. Add to this the fact that songs filch heavily from Television (especially the opening guitar squiggles of ‘To The Sea’), Strokes and Patti Smith and we’ve got a case to have Johnny Borrell expelled from these pages forever, right? Wrong.
For starters, there are occasions where Johnny’s ‘beat poetry’ becomes teeth-grindingly bad: “She’s been reading Bukowski for days…” goes ‘In The City’, demonstrating a poetic ability that’s more Ringo than Rimbaud. So, before we tell you why ‘Up All Night’ is such a great record, let’s indulge in the noble art of knocking the lad down a peg or two. But now he’s made us look, he’s gotta make us listen… For this we should applaud him: it’s entertaining, makes NME’s job a piece of piss and is everything we demand of a well-cheekboned rock star. For months he’s mouthed off in a manner that makes Liam Gallagher look like Stuart Murdoch’s speech therapist. If I was to start this review by declaring myself the greatest writer of my generation, you might read it with a vat-load of salt, right? If I compared these very words, not to those of my colleagues, but to Lester Bangs, Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens, you might mutter something along the lines of “fuck right off”, yeah? Well, that’s the position Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell finds himself in as judgement day descends on his band’s debut album.