Two Colours: Red

Best gig at Witnness, even better than the Avalanches. Two kids, brother and sister; the girl, poker-faced and as fuck-off serious as a casually cocked pistol, slamming sticks on drums with the straight-up raw power of Keith Moon. The boy, pounding a squalling guitar, twisting like a whip or a rattlesnake, bawling out blues explosions and wracked vendetta-country like something from another age. They wear only red and white. They’re as visceral as your own adrenalin and they look and sound like a revolution. This is the White Stripes. Hold on tight.

In the flesh, Jack White is quite shy. We’ve politely ambushed himself and his sister Meg after their blazing set at the Witnness Festival, and, as they have no record label here and thus have not been deemed Sharleen Spiteri enough to rate their own dressing room, we sit on park benches in the field behind the Rising tent. Jack is clearly a performer who says everything he has to say onstage, not off. He sits on the edge of the bench, looking the other way and occasionally glancing towards us, as if the interview involves someone else and he’s eavesdropping.

It makes perfect sense for The White Stripes to play only guitar, vocals and drums. This music is as raw and atavistic as first-generation rock-and-roll, when it was first pulled puling and dirty out of the blues, when it was still all mucked up with the kind of country music that has Jack Daniels in its gut, dirt under its fingernails and revenge on its mind. And indeed the Stripes are huge blues and country fans (“We love that kind of music – Robert Johnson, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams – we’ve dedicated our new album to Loretta Lynn”). But have they never thought to draft in a third or fourth member, all the same?

“That’s really just the way it started,” says Meg. “I mean, we didn’t really start with the intention of being a huge band, we were just playing together in the attic, you know. Then we ended up doing a gig, and it went well, and it just kinda went from there. We didn’t have a big picture in mind, you know?” She shrugs. “We just started jammin’ together, and we just never really felt the need for anyone else.”

They’ve been lucky, or perhaps unlucky, to have been carried to these shores largely on the breaking wave of the frenzy surrounding last week’s American rock messiahs, The Strokes. They’ve done about ten shows in the UK, all of them sold out and chock-a-block with industry folk, and inkie-watchers will notice the Stripes on the cover of a certain British weekly as we speak. They’ve been watching their current hype with amusement, some trepidation and, not least, a desire to slam on the brakes a bit.

“We’re just kinda trying to not take it seriously,” says Jack, “’cos we heard that in England, there’s just… a lotta hype, they hype a band up a lot, and a couple of months later no one cares anymore, so…” He shakes his head. “We’re trying to ask them to actually not write stuff about us, and to not put us on the cover… but…” They grin crookedly at each other with amused semi-disgust, and laugh. “Who knows, you know…”

It makes perfect unspoken sense for a band so elemental to dress in an equally basic way, but let’s ask them why anyway. What’s with the red and white?

“Because of the peppermint candy,” says Jack.

“With the swirl,” says Meg, indicating the swirl with a finger.

Jack: “The childishness thing…”

Meg: “The simplicity.”

“‘Getting in touch with being kids…”

“Anger and innocence.”

“Red and white.”

Anger and innocence. Red and white. Damn right.