That old white magic

Jim White has crammed a whole lot of living into his 44 years. White’s life to date reads like a best-selling page-turner: fundamentalist Christian, junkie, professional surfer, international model, New York cab driver and, lastly, rock ‘n’ roll star. OK, so Bono’s not exactly shitting himself just yet but Jim White has released a contender for album of the year in the shape of the brilliant No Such Place, welding his country-tinged narratives to some wonderful beatscapes courtesy of people like Morcheeba and Sohichiro Suzuki – think Alabama 3 meets Nick Cave.

“There were a lot of kind people who worked hard on this record,“ he drawls in that silky, slow southern twang, backstage at the Olympia, where he’s supporting Red House Painters, “including the record company. I wrote 70 songs and they sifted through them and said ‘these are the ones that best represent the most commercial side of your thinking. That’s our job, we’re in the music business, not the music hobby, and we want to help you send those songs into the world’.”

White’s songs reflect his often turbulent background, which was spent variously running from and embracing the dual temptations of Jesus and narcotics. The son of a military high-flyer, Jim and family moved around a lot during his early years, settling in Pensacola, Florida, when Jim was five. Indeed, he was even conceived on one of his parents’ cross-country trips, when some Catholic priests mistook the young Episcopalian family for Catholics (“my sisters were well behaved out of fear, not respect”) and sent over some drinks.

“So the molecules of my being came together through travelling and through religious confusion,” muses White. “My mother only told me this a couple of years ago and I was astonished at the strange imprint that moment seems to have had on me.”

It would have been hard for White to avoid Jesus in Pensacola, considering the town has more churches per capita than anywhere else in the US. It even has a drive-though funeral home (“You drive in, push a button, the curtains go up and there’s the deceased”).

“When I got saved in the church at 15 years old, it was a two-roomed building,” recalls White. “Now it’s this glorious edifice – and every night there are 3,000 people from all over the world faintin’ and swoonin’ and passing out, three blocks from my house.

“You can walk down a street in Pensacola and have two or three guys dressed as Jesus walk by ya, all of them carrying crosses,” he grins, “and the crosses even have little wheels on them.”

In many ways, though, Jesus did save the young White, who up ‘til then had been on a drug-fuelled escape route.

“When I got mixed up in the church, my mother was very concerned and took me aside many times, asking if I was getting involved in a cult,” he chuckles. “Little did she know that a month earlier, I was tripping on acid while I was talking to her, so I was in a lot better state in a cult than I was when I was strung out on drugs.”

Many of his friends were not so lucky.

“My best friend when I was growing up was institutionalised when he was 23 because he took so many drugs there was nothing left of his mind – and him and me were going neck and neck when I quit,” White maintains. “In ‘Handcuffed To A Fence In Mississippi’ there is a line I put in very specifically which says that “Having fun’s a terminal addiction”. You can go ahead and have all the fun you want but you will be a corpse or as good as, and that’s what happened to most of the junkies that I know. Very few of them maintained their habit in such a way that it benefited them in anything other than the moment.”

Escaping the narcotics world for one of religious devotion, White also found solace in the sea, becoming a professional surfer.

“I was a fundamentalist Christian surfer,” he says without a trace of irony. “There was a whole community of us, who were seeking God through this beautiful natural realm. We would praise Jesus for the good surf. Most of them ended up pretty bottled-up, crazy people, but the World Champion, one of the best surfers in the history of the sport, Tom Curran, was a fundamentalist Christian surfer.

”It is hedonism,” he admits, “but there are great spiritual moments when you’re surfing: when you’re not competing, you’re just riding a wave and you feel really liberated from the burdens of life and really close to God.”

In a funny way, surfing brought music into White’s life. While training for the US Surfing Championships in Hawaii, he broke his leg in a spiral fracture and “started learning guitar just to pass the time”. Returning to Pensacola, he pursued the small-town ideal, hooking up with “a girl I had always been in love with but we’d never got together”, leading the singing in his church and starting a surf-board business with his best friend. Things quickly went pear-shaped, however.

“Within a month it all fell apart with the girl, my best friend got killed in a car wreck and my seven cats died,” he recalls. “I was just about to snap.”

His sister rang him from her New York home and proffered the unlikely advice to move there and become a fashion model, which he did. The sheer absurdity of the life helped him immensely.

“I didn’t go to the discoteques or the orgies,” he notes.”I sat in rooms all over Europe, staring out the window, thinking about how to take apart the temple of self and put it back together again in such a way that it was hospitable.”

All the time, he was writing songs “full of repressed misunderstanding. I thought I was a peaceful, kind person”. It was only when he moved back to New York and began work as a cab driver that he realised how much anger he had inside him.

“I’d be out there screaming in someone’s face, spitting on ‘em and fighting, going crazy, ramming people,” he admits.”Most of the situations I was in, I was more than justified because New York is full of people looking for conflict. It wasn’t like I went and spat in some little old lady’s face. But I found out that there was an intense rage inside me and it was good to know, because it was a looming presence I couldn’t identify until I got in the cab and started burning up engines – I blew up quite a few engines. When you drive a car in New York, they’re like dog years – it feels like six years for every normal one.”

White’s songs eventually found their way to Daniel Lanois’ manager, who decided to help him get a record deal. One of the names she gave him was David Byrne, the former Talking Head runs his own Luaka Bop label. Byrne signed White immediately and the Florida native has since delivered two magical albums in the shape of Wrong Eyed Jesus and No Such Place.

“I’m trying to work my way back to the human experience because I managed to get myself pretty far into outer space,” White says. “It’s real gratifying when people all over the world say to me that what I’m saying applies to the human experience. I’m never going to be the buddy you slap on the back and have a beer with. I’m not going to deceive myself and think I can be that guy. But I think that I can belong to the world and do some good. If that’s how it works out, I’ll feel like I done my job OK.”

No Such Place is out now on Luaka Bop