Jack White
There was very little introduction to Jack White’s set at Hammersmith’s Eventim Apollo on a Wednesday evening in late August. Just a few seconds of dimmed lights before the man careered on stage, hair styled in his unmistakable black curtains, stunning the crowd with a voluminous, heavily distorted open chord. Before they had a chance to start cheering, he was shouting taunts down the mic: “You call that energy? You think you can beat Tuesday night!?” He gave the crowd a mock-bemused look at the welcome he had been given, shrugged, looked down at his guitar, and got started.
I had wondered if he might include ‘Fell In Love With a Girl’, at a lucky stretch maybe even ‘Black Math’. At the Apollo, his set started with both of those songs, with no interval between them. It was a statement. This was a set for the heads. The volume was turned up to a level that seemed designed to daze and confuse, White rapidly moving between his classic repertoire at a rate that kept the crowd several steps behind him.
He promptly moved into the riff-heavy numbers from his latest (and well-regarded) album, Frozen Charlotte, before trading the electric for a steel guitar and wading into bluesier fare. ‘Archbishop Harold Holmes’ beckoned the electric back, and the riffs continued.
The man who wrote ‘Seven Nation Army’ (perhaps the world’s most famous rock song) is, arguably, more than anyone else, demarcated for the role of a museum music act, i.e., where the artist reels out their old popular classics with little attempt to showcase their contemporary efforts. The song has become a singular anthem in the world of football, often a haven for the less musically minded, who might flood the stalls and dilute the atmosphere. Yet White’s set blew those concerns out of the window with an equal split between his older classics and the newer output plus a high octane energy that ran throughout. The no phone policy also helped.
One criticism is that White did appear strained after several nights on the trot. His voice was, at points, hoarse, and his workhorse of a drummer (Patrick Keeler, of the Raconteurs) looked like he needed a week off, ideally at a spa in the Cotswolds. The 51-year old is not getting any younger. One could advise him to take it a bit slower. But then again, that doesn’t feel very Jack White, does it?
As White and his band dropped into a ten-minute hard rock blues tangent late into his encore, I feared the worst. Had he gone full Dylan, denying his fans the track they desired most? But slowly the manic shredding gave way to the steady beat of his generational anthem. I was transported back to being 11 years old in 2005, watching my first ever video on the then-newly-minted YouTube: the kaleidoscopic triangles falling in on themselves under the inexorable riff of ‘Seven Nation Army’. The mosh pit opened and the crowd of ageing rockers let rip.
The king of the noughties garage rock revival isn’t dead. He never died. Long live the king.
