Detroit spinners | Saturday Magazine | Arts | Telegraph

An electrifying stage act coupled with a teasing behind-the-scenes relationship has made the White Stripes the most thrilling and intriguing rock band of the past 10 years - Ben Thompson separates the art from the artifice

Son House was one of the greatest of all blues singers. Born on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1902, he died 86 years later - a long way north of his birthplace, amid the urban decay of Detroit, Michigan. The White Stripes: 'We know that making the kind of music we make is inherently ridiculous because we were born in the 1970s, we’re white and we’re from Detroit'

Just across that blighted city, in the predominantly Hispanic district of Mexicantown, a 13-year-old high school student called John Gillis (later to be known as Jack White) was wholly unaware of the old man's passing. Yet White's subsequent attempts to cross the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the ancient black blues singer and the young white rock fan (he once stated his artistic goal as being 'to trick 15-year-old girls into singing Son House's lyrics') would prove astoundingly successful.

The White Stripes, the band he formed to spread the electric pulse of excitement he felt on first hearing House's song Grinning In Your Face in his late teens, would introduce a whole new generation to the dusty delights of the blues, and establish them as the most consistently thrilling rock group of the 21st century. How these things came to pass is a story with as many twists and turns as a grizzled bluesman's biography.

But the central thread of the narrative is the relationship between Jack and his hard-drumming namesake - and lone bandmate - Meg White. Although she is invariably referred to within the clearly defined borders of the White Stripes' world as his 'little sister', Meg is actually Jack's ex-wife. And while this fact is now firmly in the public domain, it is very much off limits in on-the-record situations.

Absurd as the White Stripes' ritualised avowal of a demonstrable non-fact might appear in an era of remorseless accessibility, there is something intensely refreshing about Jack and Meg White's conviction that there are some questions that should not (or at least will not) be answered. And their unfashionable commitment to the preservation of their own mystery has certainly paid dividends.

As the White Stripes pull up beside Nashville's Blackbird recording studios (in which they recently completed work on their new album) it is hard to think of any pairing in pop who could make a more instantaneous and dramatic visual impact.

As brightly coloured songbirds flit and swivel in the magnolia-scented southern spring air, Jack, 31, is at the wheel of his immaculate cream 1960 Ford Thunderbird, with Meg, 32, seated demurely by his side.

Both are dressed in their habitual black and red - a routinised garb which the latter sees as being 'like a school uniform: it means you can just focus on what you're doing, because everyone's always wearing the same thing'. Yet this improbably glamorous duo could not be more fastidiously styled if they were Johnny Depp and Parker Posey starring in a Tim Burton remake of American Graffiti.

The marked contrast between the White Stripes' aura of old-school Hollywood glamour and the earthy spontaneity of their music is in no way accidental. 'Probably my favourite thing that's ever been written about us,' Jack White avers genially, having sat down in a sumptuous cerise-flock-wallpapered reception room, 'was that the White Stripes are "simultaneously the most real and the most fake band in the world".' He breaks into a Woody Woodpecker cackle. 'That's a high compliment - to be top of both those charts...'

Continued

Next page

Detroit spinners Saturday Magazine Arts Telegraph