“I met a girl”: when Razorlight delivered the worst lyric of the 2000s indie boom
Everything becomes a cliche in retrospect. But the sobering truth we all have to accept and, more importantly, take accountability for, is that during the pomp of the 2000s indie sleaze movement, we all thought its esoteric tropes were actually cool.
I’m talking skinny jeans, Trilbys and Chelsea boots, which, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, all look like an ironic fancy dress get-up. But at the time, they were signifiers of a community whose pursuit of aesthetic nihilism made them cool. Because there was an irony to it all – this idea that beneath the scruffy, careless troubadours were deeply inquisitive and intellectual artists who were galvanising a generation through rejecting the system.
But in this pursuit, both fans and artists got high on their own supply and at times, failed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Genuinely awful ideas and lyrics were wrapped up in a big red bow and lamented as genius, because they existed inside the walls of a four-chord indie song that outrightly rejected the over-commercialism of the millennium.
For every brilliant observational Alex Turner take and desperately sad piece of introspective poetry from Pete Doherty was a lyric desperately trying to fill the void their music may briefly leave, in a bid to portray relevance.
While The Kooks experienced the sort of success that contradicts my criticism, there’s no denying that the lyrics of their debut album sound like the scribblings of a wide-eyed teenager, caught in the crosshairs of their first lustful experience – “Do you want to go to the seaside? / I’m not trying to say that everybody wants to go.”
Another band trying their best to muddle through damp lyrics with enough mouth contortion to cosplay as Pete Doherty were Razorlight. The band had a brief moment in the middle of the zeitgeist, with their debut album Up All Night and self-titled sophomore, which stirred an excitement among indie sleaze fans.
But as they embarked on this upward trajectory, their wings were clipped somewhat by their own act as a band who didn’t care about anything at all. Because as fans dug a little deeper and sought to get to know them, they realised maybe it wasn’t an act and their apathetic approach to life was just bleeding into their lyrics.
On ‘Somebody Else’, lead singer Johnny Borrell sang, “And I met a girl / She asked me my name / I told her what it was,” which has since been regarded as one of the worst lyrics of all time. In fact, in 2007, the BBC ran a poll to determine the very worst lyrics of all time, across all genres, and Borrell’s lament came in at number three.
All in all, Razorlight feels like something of an easy target when blasting the bizarre era of 2000s indie – they typified the scruffy yet self-serious approach the movement fostered, and having disbanded for a decade after their third album in 2008, have become an embodiment of the flash-in-the-pan moment that has since become known as indie sleaze.
