Some candy talking

A devastating simplicity cuts to the core of what makes The White Stripes so distinctive and essential in these post-everything times. Their kind of primal minimalism is rare in an age when laptop computers have the ability to be state of the art recording studios, production is valued above the once sacred core values of songwriting, and marketing and branding have become bigger than the artists themselves.

Sure there are sparks of hope, but turgid nu-metal and a handful of popular guitar pop bands hardly constitutes an uprising. However, around the middle of last year a duo with a real difference shot to prominence despite possessing such a wildly uncommercial sound. Tellingly, they hailed from the very same dilapidated city in Michigan, USA that spawned John Lee Hooker, Iggy and The Stooges, the MC5, Kiss, Madonna, Eminem, the Motown hit factory and the original pioneers of techno.

It was five years ago that Detroit brother and sister Jack and Meg White first formed a two-piece band.

“We were making this childish music revolving around all this childishness and trying to write lyrics from a kid’s point of view – which we still do,” laughs the very affable Jack White. “Meg was drumming really childishly and I was singing like a kid. We painted peppermint candy on the bass drum and we thought that that should be the name of the band – The White Stripes.”

But there was more method to their madness – or should that be madness to their method? – than mere bright colouration. There was numerology for example.

“At that point I had been working on sculptures and creating things all of which had to revolve around the number three,” Jack continues. “I had an upholstery shop and everything was yellow and black and white in my shop. All my tables, my van and all my tools. Everything had to be that way, even my business cards. I’d deliver furniture around Detroit dressed in yellow, black and white overalls. So with the band we thought we’d do everything in red, white and black. That would be the three. Then we could create better.”

From such simple notions has developed a success story which has taken even its protagonists by surprise. With Meg less partial to media attention, it’s Jack who takes up the story and runs with it.

“We started this band just to make 7” vinyl records or 45s, that was all we wanted to do,” he says. “It’s just very odd that hundreds of thousands of people have our records now. We never even thought about doing an album. It just started to happen when Sympathy For The Record Industry (Californian independent that has released over 500 artists) called us up and asked if we wanted to do an album. We thought: ‘Yeah that’ll be great!’ We had about 25 songs which we had been doing live and we had a few seven inches . We thought it’d be great to do an album as we might not get the chance to do one ever again. Then we wanted to make another one as soon as possible before the band was over because we thought we’d be finished pretty fast because it was such a small label and no one had ever heard of us.

“But when we got to make that second album (Destijl, 2000), it gave us a chance to go to different cities like San Francisco and Boston where we were getting popular. We got to those towns and the shows would be sold out. It was quite odd because we had just no idea. We had thought that only people who collected garage rock records were into us, which would be a thousand people in the whole country or something!”

By the time it came to recording White Blood Cells, their 2001 breakthrough album, the ripples of appreciation for The White Stripes were beginning to be felt on the other side of the Atlantic. Recorded in only three days, it contained the two most famous Stripes’ calling cards to date – the anthemic ‘Hotel Yorba’ penned in honour of a budget hotel in Detroit where the Beatles allegedly stayed, and the utterly fantastic ‘Fell In Love With A Girl’. Arguably the best song they've written and recorded to date, it featured a stunningly simple video of Jack and Meg, directed by Michel Gondry, responsible for some of the best music videos of recent years such Björk's ‘Human Behaviour’, Radiohead’s ‘Knives Out’ and clips for Aphex Twin, Beck and The Chemical Brothers. For ‘Fell In Love With A Girl’ Jack and Meg were recreated as animated lego figures.

“It was Michel's idea,” says Meg. “It was perfect because it suited the childishness of our music so well. It was so hilarious when we met him. He showed up for dinner with a huge lego replica of Jack’s head. So we just let him go with it!”

Prior to the ‘Hotel Yorba’ release, they were booked for a small European tour that touched down at the Witnness Rising stage last August before UK dates in a few toilet sized venues such as the legendary 100 Club on Oxford Street where the filth and the fury of the Sex Pistols was born in 1976.

“When we first got to England last summer we honestly thought it was going to be a nice little tour and a holiday,” Jack recalls. “But we discovered in a few days that it was quite insane. Some of it was just out of our control. I remember the NME saying we want to put you on the cover and we said we didn’t want to go on the cover. We thought those guys would just chew us up and spit us out. We said no, but they put us on the cover anyway. They just came to a show, took a photo and put it on the cover whether we liked it or not. That was our first lesson in realising that a lot of these things were out of our hands and there was nothing we could really do about that.”

Still with enemies like that, who needs friends? Not that The White Stripes have been short of welcome support.

“John Peel has been really nice in the way that he has supported us,” says Jack of the living indie legend who said that The White Stripes were ‘the most exciting thing since Hendrix’. I’ve always respected him and I’ve always respected his word. He usually knows what he is talking about so for him to praise us is probably the best thing because you just know he isn’t lying. He means it. He’s not fake. You’re very lucky that you can get to hear his show in Europe because we haven’t got anything like that in America, or at least around Detroit where you don’t have any college radio. It’s all radio that’s owned by nationwide companies.”

Ironically, Jack and Meg are now being playlisted on those very same stations.

“It’s very funny because you’d have radio stations playing Incubus and Staind and Limp Bizkit and then you have one of our songs,” Jack giggles. “My friend said to me that we were on his alarm clock when he woke up one morning! It doesn’t fit with anything else on the radio so it’s quite hilarious.”

In addition to being on mainstream radio, Jack and Meg have been hyped to the hilt by a media desperate for a new scene to break. Entertainment Weekly published a now infamous article on how Detroit was the new Seattle, singling out the Stripes as torch bearers for the sound of indie Americana breaking worldwide.

“I think everyone that writes, anxiously awaits a scene and would like to put a scene together that doesn’t really exist,” opines Jack. “That’s why we are lumped in with The Strokes. At times I don’t mind that. I’m glad that people are just interested in rock n’ roll. Some teenagers will get into rock n’ roll again and get away from all this fakeness that’s on MTV and on the radio so there are good parts about this.

“But with Detroit, I’m a little wary of people to call it a scene because I know all these bands and they’re great but I don’t want people to be embarrassed to be from here in five years, like it was for a band in Seattle in ’95 and ’96. That would be horrible to live with. But I don’t think people can blow it up in the same way. We have a long history of music from blues to Motown and all that. It’s always had lots of diverse types of really good music, because it’s so far away from Los Angeles and New York and all that music industry stuff that people have time and energy to work on good things. The city is quite depressing and quite abandoned so it’s great so much has come out of here. If you really know about music and its history you know that it’s not something that never existed before.”

What Detroit artists struck a chord with the young Jack White?

“I used to garbage pick a lot and someone had thrown out a bunch of records on our street and I found the Stooges’ first album,” Jack remembers. “I listened to it not really knowing who it was until someone told me later that it was Iggy Pop and his band. I was sixteen or something and I was so proud that something so good had come from our area. I was super-interested in him and I had to get everything by The Stooges at that point. I was mad that people hadn’t even told me about it. It was the best thing I ever found in the garbage! Our older brothers and sisters were into mainstream stuff so it took a long time to get exposure to blues and punk and stuff.”

The sound of Detroit 2001 was lovingly documented by Jack on the current compilation entitled Sympathetic Sounds Of Detroit. Jack recorded nineteen tracks by fourteen bands in the same studio using exactly the same microphones and amplifiers. The resultant album is a perfect resource for sampling the Motor City’s very best garage noiseniks such as The Von Bondies and The Dirtbombs who are both sharing the bill with the Stripes at Dublin Castle. Fellow Sympathy For The Record Industry label mates The Von Bondies have one album to date entitled Lack Of Communication which was produced by the same very industrious Jack White. The spiky garage grit showcased on that record is referred to around Detroit as “the romantic sounds of depraved youth”.

Having grown up in a mainly Mexican neighbourhood with Meg and eight other siblings, Jack White believes that Detroit’s racial diversity also adds to the music mix. Many of techno’s founding fathers were Detroiters of colour – Juan Atkins (who coined the term techno), Derrick May, Carl Craig and the legendary Mike Banks, founder of Underground Resistance, probably the indie-est label in the world, and whose diehard maxim is: “No hope. No dreams. My only escape is the underground.”

Jack’s songwriting reflects the same suspicion of so-called progress and prosperity. Their eponymous debut contained ‘The Big Three Killed My Baby’ – a punk blues blast that rails against the motor industry. Destijl had the hilarious phone company-baiting ‘Hello Operator’ while White Blood Cells included the fierce corporate protest song ‘I Think I Smell A Rat’.

“Lifestyles these days are extremely complicated,” Jack reflects. “Everybody wants to get a cellphone and everything. Times were tough for people in the ’30s but some things made a lot more sense in the way people related to each other and stuff . It wasn’t sophisticated and it was by no means proper as a way of life with racism and other abusive attitudes being so prevalent, but in other ways, I think people had a better grasp of what life was really about.

“The whole world has now gotten used to communicating through cellphones and e-mails,” he goes on. “Cultures are getting destroyed because everybody in the world aspires towards the exact same level of prosperity. Everything is becoming like an American mall. You go to Mexico and you have a mall there and you go for a walk downtown in Paris and it’s not that different to walking downtown in LA. It’s so sad. Everybody wants to have nice things or whatever – but it’d be nice if when you went to Mexico it was Mexico. If everybody in the world is the same and we all do the same things and eat the same food and talk the same language there isn’t any culture left. Culture is what breeds really good music and really good art.”

But in becoming a jet-setting alternative figurehead, has Jack been tempted to swallow his principles and get a mobile?

“No. I made a pact never to own one,” he deadpans. “I’ve been tried to be tricked into it many times by people but it just feels really wrong to me. It’s like when you buy a brand new washing machine and you’re made to believe that you can’t live without it. I don’t like when companies trick you in to thinking that about any product. You don’t need any of that stuff. Like now you get ordinary everyday people running their living room as if it was a business. You call someone up and it’s like can I put you on hold. Are you running a business or are you just talking to your friends?”

So Jack White’s short-term goals do not include a trip to the local phone shop to pick up the latest WAP enabled handset. What does feature on his agenda is the fourth White Stripes album, which he reveals has the working title Elephant. Initially, the album was due to hit the stores this September, although Meg reckons that a release date of early 2003 is more realistic in order to honour touring commitments.

Earlier this month, they played four sold out nights in a row in New York’s famous Bowery Ballroom. A capacity audience included The Strokes, who were just back in town after their Olympia engagement, and none other than bona fide superstar Bette Midler.

“It was amazing!” Jack raves. “She was dancing on the balcony all night! We impressed Bette Midler. Wow!”

Regardless of how high the celeb count gets, The White Stripes aren’t going to fundamentally change anything about their modus operandi. Meg maintains they will continue to license their records as opposed to signing with anyone, a method that was also followed by Pavement.

“It’s the only way of guaranteeing total artistic control,” she believes. There won’t be any fancy studios or name producers either.

“I think if someone is in an old hotel room or something with just an out of tune guitar and a broken amplifier and a tape recorder with one track on it, I guess they are going to come up with something that is a lot more interesting than some million dollar band in a studio with 300 tracks,” Jack opines.

“We’ve never been a polished band and we’ve never worked on albums for very long. We never tried to perfect everything we do. I think it’s a mistake to try and do something for thirty takes and keep adding and overdubbing things. If we can’t play it live we’re not going to record it.”

As White Blood Cells gradually climbs the Billboard charts and finds more and more welcome homes all over the world, The White Stripes appear to be real proof that you can be what you want to be, do it your own sweet way, tour the world, gatecrash the mainstream and offer a genuine rock n’ roll epiphany to hundreds of thousands of people – even if it is lo-fi punk blues.

“It appears to be slightly possible!” Jack laughs. “We’re learning!”

A Listener's Guide to The White Stripes

Thought that Jack and Meg released their debut album last year? Wrong. Detroit’s finest already have three excellent albums and a clutch of ultra rare 7" releases under their belt including a cracking cover of Dolly Parton’s country cat fight anthem ‘Jolene’. “Having three albums really helped with the shows and press recently," Meg reveals. "We've a lot of material to choose from each night. Its a lot less tedious and much more enjoyable for us to be up there rather than just having one album and doing the exact same songs for every show.”

Here are the ones to familiarise yourself with before Dublin Castle.

The White Stripes (1999) [Sympathy For The Record Industry]

Incendiary debut which revealed the breathtaking range of sound and emotion that two people can capture. Jack yelps over razor raw riffs and spectacular bursts of Meg’s “childish” drumming.

Key stripes: ‘The Big Three Killed My Baby’, ‘When I Hear My Name’, ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’.

De Stijl (2000) [Sympathy For The Record Industry]

Brilliant second album that is a firm fan’s favourite. The Stripes begun to master a knack for turning the blues and punk into the best noisepop around which was set to go supernova one year later.

Key stripes: ‘You’re Pretty Good Looking’, ‘Hello Operator’, ‘Apple Blossom’, ‘Truth Don't Make A Noise’.

White Blood Cells (2001) [Sympathy For The Record Industry]

The one that cracked it. Bursting at the seams with infectious pop thrills and frills and hit singles a go go. You've got this one by now surely!

Key stripes: ‘Hotel Yorba’, ‘Fell In Love With A Girl’, ‘Same Boy You’ve Always Known’, ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’, ‘I Think I Smell A Rat’.