The White Stripes, Civic Hall, Wolverhampton
Meg and Jack conjure the spectral sound of rock'n'roll
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Your support makes all the difference.The perfect ideal for a band that Jack and Meg White lovingly assembled in Detroit obscurity five years ago has put them at rock's pinnacle today.
Their fourth album, Elephant, tops Britain's chart on the day their world tour starts, largely because their reduction of rock to its primal, mysterious elements has stayed unspoiled. They have created their own world, coloured in the red and white of all their clothes, and almost literally incestuous in its private secrecy: are they brother and sister, or ex-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 were alien unknowns.
But today's mass media, on whose radar they suddenly exist, has no time for mystery. Its voracious interest may soon reduceElephant, for all its majesty, to one more dinner party accessory.
It takes one minute of the White Stripes' matchless rock'n'roll show to dash those doubts. Meg is in white, Jack is in red, and, to a roaring welcome reserved for heroes, they act out their relationship with each other and their music in a mood of high-octane drama.
The aggression and volume the pair conjure unaided is quite remarkable. But it is the taunting way Meg thrust her chin at her possible ex-husband as she slams the drums, while he shoves himself close and pulls blues squalls from his guitar, that makes the spectacle so human and raw. By the time Jack sings Dolly Parton's "Jolene'', turning it into a racked murder ballad, and Meg responds with the burial blues of "Cold, Cold Ground'', they sing like the sparring couple, or siblings, from hell.
In the new single "Seven Nation Army'', with a single guitar Jack drags up a series of sounds that strip all rock's embellishment. A bass riff tunnels through its tune, followed by a thunderous bull-roar. Finally, the tension coiled in all the White Stripes' playing is unleashed, as Jack howls arcane words about the Queen of England and hounds of hell. By the end, his face is masked by a curtain of sweat-drenched hair. And his amped, echoing notes make this Midlands hall seem like the temporary, unexpected resting place of the sexual, spectral sound that rock'n'roll was when the world first fell in love with it. Brother or sister, husband or wife, Jack and Meg are the real deal tonight.
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