Johnny Borrell slams bands who spend more time on Instagram than playing instruments

16 May 2020, 11:00 | Updated: 16 May 2020, 11:01

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The Razorlight frontman has hit out at bands who put more energy into social media than working on their craft.

Johnny Borrell thinks bands today spend too much time on Instagram.

The Razorlight frontman has revealed he doesn't own a smartphone and isn't big on technology, while slamming artists for making social media their priority over honing their craft as musicians.

Speaking to The Sun newspaper's Bizarre column: "I've never ever owned a smartphone.

"It's not my thing. I know musicians who spend more hours per day on their Instagram than they do playing their instrument or practising their instrument. It doesn't make sense to me."

Razorlight frontman at Electric Picnic Music Festival 2019. Picture: Debbie Hickey/Getty Images

Borrell isn't backwards about coming forwards when it comes to his opinions, and he has discussed whether he regrets things he's said and done in the past.

Quizzed back in 2018 if he regrets anything from his younger days, he told NME: "Well, I’m not sure – because some of the things I was reported as saying I did say, and some of the things I didn’t.

"I can’t stand by anything that I never said at the time. There was quite a culture back then of ‘Oh, let’s just nick two words out of that sentence, it doesn’t change the meaning’. Of course it does!

"Especially if one of the words is ‘not’. Looking back on it in the first year of doing Razorlight, I was very much ‘motormouth rent-a-quote’."

Talking about his previous criticisms of other bands, the Up All Night rocker mused: "I dropped a couple of tasty one-liners about other bands at the time with hopefully some form of humour, but I had just graduated from being a punter, therefore from being a consumer of music to a maker of music in the public eye.

He added: "When we talk about bands in the pub or amongst friends, we slate things or will say ‘that’s amazing’ or ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’.

"I hadn’t learned the rules of what you can and shouldn’t say, like sportsmen do these days. It’s often better to say nothing."