“Do you believe me yet?” yells Jack White from the lip of the stage, a few songs into his second night’s work at this classy art deco venue in east London. It’s a very Jack White kind of location: highly stylised, lovingly restored, but not entirely removed from its unglamorous surroundings.
Lit in deep blue and strobing white, the colour palette of his solo career, White and his band have played tracks from his most recent album, the surprise-released No Name, first handed out free on white-label vinyl to unsuspecting shoppers at Third Man stores in Nashville, Detroit and London last summer (Third Man Records is White’s own imprint). It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking) is a particularly rousing workout full of guitar shock and awe, from an album that has drawn relieved and delighted comparisons to White’s first band, the White Stripes.
He’s also stormed through Black Math, from the White Stripes’ fourth album, 2003’s Elephant, a disc recorded entirely on analogue gear at Toe Rag Studios in Homerton, Hackney, just a few miles down the road. Roaming across his discography, White and his band have just absolutely pulverised Broken Boy Soldier – a 2006 cut from the Raconteurs, another White side outfit. It’s virtually unrecognisable in this early 70s acid-blues-rock version. Mini whirlpools of flailing bodies ebb and flow through it all.
White began this gig with an affirmation – that “everything that comes out of my mouth tonight will be the truth!” A little while later, though, he introduces himself as “Johnny Guitar, from Hackney”. You can’t help but grin. It’s 2025, the postwar world order is in grave flux, but we are on surprisingly steady ground here tonight. Kaleidoscopic garage-punk blues fills the air, and a mischievous artist who always delivers is playing fast and loose in more ways than one.
Since White first started damaging speaker cones as half of the White Stripes in the early 00s, this Detroit-born Nashville transplant has enjoyed a relationship with fact perhaps best described as capricious. White Stripes drummer Meg White being his “sister” was a key foundational sleight of hand.
But White doesn’t actually want audiences to believe every tall tale he tells. A keen student of legends past, he has long been drawn to obfuscation and myth-making – creative strategies that go back to Bob Dylan and beyond, to blues people and showfolk of all kinds.
Rather, White wants us to believe in him – in the intensity with which he curates his 360-degree aesthetic, and in the righteousness of the sound-world he has manifested from source materials brimming with raw, pre-modern resonance.
Most of all, he wants us to be won over by the fervour with which all this is delivered. He stalks around in bone-white shoes, shaking his replenished mop of curly black hair (it was short and blue for a while). He faces off against the keys player, wears grooves in the stage. The band make everything heavy and roiling, then they pull out a blithe, garage-pop song such as the White Stripes’ You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl).
There’s never been a bad set of musicians backing this showboating guitarist, but tonight’s trio – go-to drummer Patrick Keeler (the Raconteurs), bassist Dominic Davis (from the Buzzards, a previous White backing band) and Bobby Emmett, a relative new boy vamping on keys, who wears his shades all night – are a particularly taut lineup. White joins Emmett at his organ station for a keyboard-heavy, rococo romp through the White Stripes’ Apple Blossom. Elsewhere, there are long, jam-like codas, near-constant segues; at one point, Iggy and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog emerges out of the squall.
The encore is nearly as long as the first set. At the end, the viral terrace-chant riff to Seven Nation Army causes the security guards – normally immune to whatever music is going on behind them – to whip their heads around. Somewhere in the middle is Archbishop Harold Holmes, an instant classic White tune from the new album, where truth, falsehood, patter and faith are remixed to a Led Zeppelin-like swinging chug.
In the lyrics, White plays the itinerant preacher, coming to your town. It is, in part, a riff of hucksters ancient and modern, promising a cure for all ills. “And if you are suffering a strange sickness,” White hisses, “Or someone is blocking up all of your success, you need to see me right away so I can fix this.”
The many parallels between religious and musical spectacle are well studied but tonight, White makes a very convincing salesman of rock’n’roll’s fundamentals. Under all the bluster, his belief in the power of pacy, sly electric blues to cure a lot of ills remains very persuasive. He really is the kind of showman who can make you feel better for a while.
