The White Stripes: Special relationship

Jack and Meg White have kept their secrets, despite being the band of the moment. Nick Hasted considers the unusual achievement of The White Stripes

The perfect blueprint for a band devised by Jack and Meg White in Detroit obscurity six years ago has put them at rock's pinnacle today. Their fourth album, Elephant, topped Britain's chart as their world tour started this week, largely because their reduction of rock to its primal, mysterious elements has stayed unspoilt. They have created their own world coloured in the red and white of all their clothes, strangely secretive and perhaps even incestuous: are they brother and sister, or former husband and wife? The media uncertainty, like the raw-boned blues howl of their music, recalls rock's first days, when alarming records appeared from nowhere, and their makers seemed alien unknowns.

It's an effect that must please Jack White. The musical roots he has chosen for himself were ancient even when Elvis Presley first jolted America. It is the black bluesmen of the 1930s that fill his head, men such as Robert Johnson, whose records were played for decades before a photo of him was found, and whose death, by poison or gun, is as enigmatic as the Whites' marriage vows are today. Jack has gone so far as to say that he wishes he were one of those long-gone men – a statement of vast insensitivity to their awful lives, but somehow typical of the Stripes' freakish isolation from their own times.

The strength needed to be so alone was forged in their birthplace. Detroit is a city abandoned by the rest of America, a zone of vacant lots and roofless factories. It is the place of desolation and struggle that bred Eminem, the pop world's other current, startling saviour. In both cases, its hopeless ruins have bred hardier specimens than the fashionable celebrities of America's coasts. And for the White Stripes, it offered the time and space to sculpt an aesthetic. With no thought of success in the outside world, the 1910s De Stijl school of art, with its insistence on straight lines and primary colours, joined the starkness of acoustic blues as inspiration. Only the colours red and white, with touches of black, would ever be worn.

They would record only with analogue equipment. Meg would play drums, and Jack would play guitar. Anything else would be excess. "The most important part of art is knowing when to stop," as Jack said recently. With their home-made, almost child-like set of rules, and raw musicianship honed almost in secret, they were deliberately like nothing else. So when, after two obscure albums, they toured Britain in 2001, their impact was incendiary, and flared from the music press to the mainstream. It had been earned. It only seemed like hype until you saw the energy the couple conjured on stage, and heard an awe in rock'n'roll that you'd forgotten.

It is a strange, heartening story to date. But with Elephant – recorded, again, with equipment pre-dating 1963, but still more musically expansive than anything they've done before – the White Stripes find themselves at a crossroads. Suddenly they are the No 1 band, pop stars despite themselves. They have appeared on the radar of today's mass media, which have little time for mystery or limits. Voracious media interest could soon reduce Elephant, for all its majesty, to one more dinner-party accessory.

The White Stripes' resistance to this process may well be their most important achievement. Because the problem with the 21st-century pop world that's now forced to deal with them is not lack of talent, but the deadening predictability of its selling. No matter how promising the band, when you see them flogging their new single on every TV show that will have them, meaning and talent sold, dissected and dissolved like soap, it's hard to feel much for them, after a while.

Here, too, the White Stripes, more than anyone, know when to stop. They agree to almost no interviews. When they do, and are asked stupid questions, they stay silent. As with Jack White's adoration of antique, analogue equipment, he and Meg are defying the way corporations tell us the world has to be now. They make career "celebrities" such as Robbie Williams look foolish. They are fascinating because they haven't told and sold all for fame.

For the moment, even the media are smitten. Certificates of marriage and divorce between the Whites are widely available. But they have been ignored. It is as if even hardened hacks hanker to be credulous, and believe again in pop's myth and mystery, when faced with this red-and-white puzzle.

It will not last, of course. So neither will the White Stripes. Jack has hinted that their next album will be their last. The electro-shock revival of rock'n'roll they're delivering on record and stage will soon be a memory, impossible to sell or spoil.

'Elephant' is out now on XL