Interview: Jack White - Musician

Published on Monday 3 May 2010 19:13

JACK'S back. The singer, writer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and entrepreneur behind some of the greatest rock'n'blues records of the Noughties is once again on the campaign trail – that is, playing scorching gigs and doing as few interviews as he can get away with.

• Jack White has turned to drumming duties with the Dead Weather. Picture: Getty

Jack White, the creative force at the heart of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, likes to let his music do the talking. Luckily for this reluctant interviewee, there are literally piles of music.

This summer, White is on Dead Weather duty. He formed the heavy blues band in 2009 with singer Alison Mosshart of London-based duo The Kills. They're about to put out Sea Of Cowards, just ten months since the four-piece released their debut, Horehound.

It's too fast, it transpires, for Columbia, the major label that distributed Horehound. The new album – produced by White and on which he is more the drummer than the guitarist – is appearing via another major label, Warner Bros, "because Columbia just weren't interested in picking it up," he says. "I think they would have been if we'd have waited another year, like you're supposed to." Even if you're one of the most successful and totemic artists of the Noughties, sometimes the mainstream music industry can't keep up, it seems.

"I just thought The Kills were great," he says of his first encounter with Mosshart's other band, in which she partners with Jamie Hince, boyfriend of Kate Moss. He saw them at a British festival, "perhaps Leeds, and it was the last time I went out in the crowd and watched a band at a festival.

"There were so many guy/girl two-pieces that were coming out after the Stripes," he continues, "and so much of it was so boring. The Kills were connected really deeply to the blues, but they were doing their own spin on it, that had nothing to do with us. I was just enamoured at how cool what they were doing was. So we became friends pretty fast."

An idea for the two duos to record a seven-inch single together morphed into a one-off project featuring White, Mosshart and Little Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs. "But we started recording more, and it became an album, and it became a band and, 'Hey, shall we play some shows?'"

If you're as gifted and driven as Jack White, new projects making critically acclaimed records come as easily as that – though it helps that he is, these days, almost entirely self-sufficient.

At the home in Nashville that he shares with his wife, English supermodel Karen Elson, and their children Scarlett, four, and Henry, two, he's built a recording studio in the backyard and headquartered his own record label, Third Man. Elson used these facilities to record her own album, last month's The Ghost Who Walks. He partners with major labels to release the bigger, "CD-based" projects such as The Dead Weather. "The big labels have the muscle to push things worldwide. Our place is still small and vinyl-based with some digital on the side."

White is a time-served furniture upholsterer from Detroit, and he designed and constructed the studio himself. A man of old-fashioned values, he despises the way music is now "content", how the speed of the internet fosters short attention spans, and how the web is also no respecter of manners but rather a breeding ground for mob hysteria where it's very easy to publicly spit venom, and also very easy to hide (the album title Sea Of Cowards is a reference to this). The Third Man label and studio let him fashion his own response: homemade records done on his terms, at his speed, according to his principles.

"Starting up Third Man was the positive move from me," he says, acknowledging with a laugh that he's aware how often he comes across as so negative in interviews. White's rock'n'roll fundamentalism finds form in the brute-beauty simplicity of the music he makes with The White Stripes: guitar, drums, no bass, no stage colours other than red or white. And it's expressed in his famously prodigious output: the two Dead Weather albums follow two similarly quickfire Raconteurs albums. He likes to produce, too. If he built his own institutions he could put his money where his mouth is and work with artists directly, and put out those records immediately. You want immediacy? Well, here it is, but it's something tangible and real.

His restless energy was apparent from the moment The White Stripes exploded into Britain out of Detroit in 2001. And it was a kind of explosion. He and drummer Meg White (his ex-wife and not, as they claimed initially, his sister) created a melodic, punchy racket, exemplified by songs like Seven Nation Army and The Hardest Button To Button.

These thrilling sounds, drawn from White's blazing musicianship and intuitive understanding of the blues, were a revelation in a music world in which, at the time, guitar music was deemed redundant.

A recent beneficiary of his punk-Stakhanovite zeal was young British female folk due Smoke Fairies. They met White in a London pub and pressed a seven-inch single into his hand. Back home in Nashville he played it over breakfast. Impressed, he got on the phone to the pair. Do they want to come over and do a 45 together? They did, and it worked out great.

Similarly – but at the same time dissimilarly – White/Third Man have recently produced a new album by Wanda Jackson, 72, a one-time girlfriend of Elvis Presley. "Wanda was the first rock'n'roll queen," says White. "I think a lot of female artists today have her to thank for breaking the door down."

The album is a collection of covers, including Amy Winehouse's You Know I'm No Good, which has been released on a seven-inch single.

Nor has he been neglecting the missus. White produced The Ghost Who Walks, a ghostly and (considering it's a long way from her day job) surprisingly affecting folk record. "I had no idea that she could write, and that she had written!" he claims with a chuckle. "It was news to me. When I finally heard it I was like, 'Wow, that's really good. Do you have more of these?' So it was baby steps, and then pretty soon we were in the studio. The idea was we'd do a seven-inch. But it turned into an album, just like The Dead Weather."

Where and how did his wife manage to write and record demos without him knowing? "Ha ha! Well, it's a big house!" laughs White. His approach to interviews is still fundamentally like his approach to making music: serious, no-nonsense, let's get it done. But he does, occasionally, become playful. "Yeah, she's sneaky that way." Little Jack Lawrence, who is listening quietly by White's side, pipes up: "And she knows your kryptonite is cats."

"Yeah," nods White, "if she goes where the cats are – there are two on the property – you won't see me for long. I am deathly allergic to them. Thirty seconds and I'm sneezing." Only cats, it seems, can slow Jack down.

&#149 Sea of Cowards is released on 10 May