Johnny Borrell is a walking rock and roll cliché

Razorlight's frontman is a true rock and roll archetype. Well, actually he's several rock and roll archetypes rolled into one...

A lot of Razorlight's recent press has focused on the departure of drummer/co-songwriter Andy Burrows. But never mind that - surely not enough has been written about the complexity of the group's engine, Johnny Borrell, a man with an uncanny ability to absorb and assimilate everything he touches. Truly, Borrell is the essential oil of rock, having absorbed and assimilated pop culture's greatest essences into a condensed soup labelled 'Cream of Getting it On'.

This week, the band play their biggest headline show so far, no doubt literally rocking the socks off a sell-out crowd at the O2 Arena. Excitingly, this is also the London debut for new drummer David 'Skully' Sullivan-Kaplan (as seen in our exclusive picture below). But just what are the primal elements that make Borrell the man we know, love and secretly want to be?

Style: Iggy Pop
All right, so many people in history have worn skintight trousers and no shirt - ballet dancers, for example, or circus strongmen. But once Johnny warms up on stage and gets into his bare-chested, deep-vein-thrombosis-risking, snake-hipped electro-boogie, there's no mistaking the influence of rock music's favourite reformed hellraiser, a man so dangerous to society even his insurance ads get banned.

Hair: Stevie Nicks
Johnny doesn't just share the former Fleetwood Mac singer's knack for a crowd-pleasing hook - he also shares an abiding passion for the gypsy shag haircut, which complements his oval face. He's had it trimmed for the summer, but we're sure it'll be back to its leonine glory by September.

Brains: Crispian Mills
Borrell first met one-time bandmate Christian Smith-Pancorvo and former Libertines bassist John Hassall while being educated at the prestigious Highgate School. Spookily, this is the same establishment attended by an equally controversial (though somewhat less successful) blond indie rocker, Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker. Borrell, however, was able to make it without the advantage of having a
famous parent.

Stage patter: Bob Dylan
Johnny Borrell, Live 8, July 2 2005: 'All you need is love - John Lennon said that. Music can change the world - Bono said that,' Borrelltestified to the faithful, before plugging the Make Poverty History campaign adding, 'Sign the fucking petition - I said that!'
Indeed he did - although his speech's format was inspired by Dylan's 'Talkin' World War III Blues' and Dylan cohort Bruce Gleason's 1965 essay 'Like A Rolling Stone'

Attitude: Noel Gallagher
Although the jealous media often cast Johnny as an arrogant man, he has merely taken a leaf from the bulging, gold-plated book of Noel Gallagher, whose will to power was responsible for Oasis's subsequent success. He even selects similar judicious targets, such as The Kooks, of whom Gallagher once remarked: 'You're always looking at him out of The Kooks and going, "I dunno if you mean it, man."' Compare this with Borrell's arguably superior barb: 'He models his style on me, and that record is the most horrible thing I've ever heard. It sounds like the band are literally rolling over, sticking their arse in the air and begging Radio 1 to fuck them.'
Touring arrangements: Ian Brown
Brown has said that in the declining days of the Roses the band were split across two tourbuses - 'the cocaine bus, and the non-cocaine bus', with Brown firmly ensconced in the latter, skinning up and listening to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Borrell is known for using a similar number of vehicles when on tour, although in Razorlight's case they have been more wholesomely demarcated as 'the Borrell bus' and 'the non-Borrell bus', allowing Johnny to rest up properly for each show and adjust the air-con correctly to preserve his mellifluous tones.