THE WHITE STRIPES GQ FEATURE

As the locals put it, Nashville is a drinking town with a music problem. It's a balmy spring night and on the touristy thoroughfare Broadway, sad-eyed cowboys sing Garth Brooks songs and half-heartedly hustle. "If you're dyslexic, please don't spit in the tips cup," mumbles a balladeer at Legends Corner. Mechanical bulls buck drunk jocks from their saddles, kids buy "Beat a drum, bang a drummer" T-shirts and elderly folk shop for "I'm a Little Redneck" romper suits. But as with most American cities, two blocks can make a hell of a difference.

Situated on the more cultivated 6th Avenue, the Hermitage Hotel is a grand old dame of a venue, Southern-style buffed to a high sheen. Past the porter in top hat and tails, down the marble staircase, next to the posh, crypt-like interior of the Capitol Grille restaurant, there is an overstuffed snug bar. It could be a Coen Brothers set: the kind of place where a hangdog William H Macy might drink alone. The bartender's small, quizzical eyes and ginger moustache give him the air of a surprised rodent. The sparse clientele is the expense-account set in shirtsleeves, doing business over chubby club sandwiches and room-temperature Miller Lite. Apparently both Jon Bon Jovi and Neil Young are staying at the hotel tonight, but either they're hitting the minibar or drinking elsewhere.

Nonetheless the bar is about to get an injection of serious star talent. Three-time Grammy-winning, supermodel-marrying, platinum-selling guitar-and-drum duo the White Stripes walk in, cautiously look around and take their seats in the corner. They look extraordinary. Pale-faced Jack White, dressed head to toe in black, is tall, lean and handsome: he looks like a sleep-deprived outlaw. Gone is the matador hat and goatee of his last incarnation, a look memorably described by Noel Gallagher as "Zorro on doughnuts". Meg White however, hasn't quite shaken off her Gothic past. Her long black hair is piled high, while a short zebra dress combines with killer high heels to give her a sexy, if stilted, gait.

None of the locals pays them any attention. Deals continue to be made, fries picked at and beers drained. We wander over to their table and hearty slugs of bourbon and long-necked bottles of brown ale are ordered. Our interview, to discuss their magnificent sixth album Icky Thump, out this month, isn't scheduled till tomorrow, but Meg giggles sweetly when introduced to a Brit hack a long way from home. Jack seems edgy. He strides to the bar to change his order rather than waiting for the hamster's help. When asked whether their relative anonymity tonight is the exception rather than the norm, Jack is phlegmatic. Does he get stopped in the street? "Yeah, sometimes. Mostly for surveys." Does he enjoy being famous? "It's nice to have freedom. To do whatever we want to do. Which we had when we weren't famous, so there you go..."

The GQ shoot is discussed: it turns out that Nashville's Elliston Place Soda Shop, despite having the right look and colour scheme for the band, is off the list. "Yeah, bastards," says Jack. "I used to go to that place, man. Someone took my wallet and wouldn't admit to it. It was really disgusting." As they depart, the bartender leans in to clear a customer's cutlery and whispers, "Well, that's your rock'n'roll experience for the evening." And then he has to explain who the White Stripes are.

***

Here's what the Nashville bar flies have missed. Jack and Meg are the Detroit duo that the late John Peel described as the most exciting thing in music "since I first heard Jimi Hendrix". They've produced five albums based on their love of the blues, plus a handful of exceptional singles, most notably "Seven Nation Army", whose monstrous riff has been inescapable since 2003. They pretend to be brother and sister when they are, in fact, divorced. Probably. They only wear three colours: red, white and black. French film director Michel Gondry is behind their award-winning videos; the band appeared in Jim Jarmusch's acclaimed film Coffee And Cigarettes; Jack acted in Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain and dated co-star Renée Zellweger. Last year, he teamed up with singer-songwriter Brendan Benson to form a new band called the Raconteurs. He now lives in Nashville with his wife, British supermodel Karen Elson and their baby Scarlett. There's another little White on the way. Meg lives in LA - alone, as far as anyone can tell. Later tonight, Jack will drive his black saloon Mercedes the short journey to Benson's house where he'll rehearse with the Raconteurs. Meg will go back to her hotel room and watch the Biography Channel.

When we reconvene the following morning, Jack and Meg are conducting interviews three floors up in one of the Hermitage's lavish suites. A former upholsterer, Jack passes judgment on the room's furnishings. "This doesn't line up properly," he says, flicking a pleat of his chair dismissively. "You've got to make sure the pattern repeats all the way down." He is wearing a tight red T-shirt, black skinny jeans and a big silver belt buckle bearing his name. When he stretches his arms over his head, stray tufts of underarm hair poke out. He sits legs apart, cocksure, and has a disconcerting habit of staring over my shoulder into the distance. He's drinking Perrier, occasionally removing one forefinger from the bottle to make a popping sound. I get the impression I might be boring him, particularly because he has a habit of saying, "That's interesting," to enquiries that clearly aren't. Still, he laughs a great deal, albeit in a slightly superior way.

Meg is smiley and quiet. Very quiet. She's content to let Jack take the brunt of the questioning. She's chaining Camels and drinking a can of iced Starbucks, and wearing the same black-and-white dress as last night, this time set off with a red scarf. Much has been made of Meg's silence during Stripes interviews. Most journalists portray her as Sphinx-like, smiling slyly and giving up few secrets. Long-time Stripes fan and collaborator Jim Jarmusch, the director of indie classics Stranger Than Paradise and Broken Flowers, explains that Meg's silence is often misconstrued. "Meg's incredibly intelligent and amazingly literate musically," he explains from his New York office. "I'm older than both her and Jack and they know everything I know! Meg just lets Jack be the spokesman, so we don't hear a lot from her."

During my encounter with Meg, she lives up to Jarmusch's billing. She reveals her pop-culture reservoir to be deeper than Jack's. When discussing their new song "Rag And Bone", she references the American version of Steptoe And Son. She had read Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain before seeing Jack on screen, so knew exactly when he was going to appear. She is self-deprecating about modelling in a Marc Jacobs campaign, shot by Juergen Teller. "It was so cool. We were out in the woods near LA. But it was a bit creepy - Juergen had a bunch of people standing around with flashlights. It was a bit Blair Witch."

The White Stripes biography has been deliberately shrouded in mystery, littered with half truths, conjecture and rumour. But certain facts have emerged. Jack is 31, Meg a year older. Jack, christened John Anthony Gillis, was raised in Detroit, Michigan, with six brothers and three sisters. His first gig, when he was ten, was Bob Dylan. He sat in seat No.666. He wasn't always going to be a musician. He considered becoming a priest and was accepted at Wisconsin seminary. "I still think about it at times," he says. "It's having a calling. Sometimes you don't know what the calling is - and sometimes as a musician your calling is working out what's going on in your brain." Instead of joining the clergy, at age 15 Jack became an apprentice upholsterer and, in the same year, decided to start playing guitar. At 18, he started his own business. Tellingly, Third Man Upholstery had it's own colour scheme, too. It was black, yellow and white. It also had a slogan: "Your Furniture's Not Dead". Jack used to slip poetry inside the furniture. To his knowledge, it has still never been found.

Jack first met Megan Martha White, a waitress from Grosse Pointe, in 1994, when he was playing with a band called Goober and the Peas. Jack and Meg married in September 1996 and formed the White Stripes a year later, after Meg started drumming along to Jack's cover of David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream". Meg's stark, metronomic style has been occasionally mocked, but fans, including Jim Jarmusch, will defend her to the last. "I love that primitivism," the director says. "Her drumming is beautiful. In the context of what they do, it's perfect. I've talked to drummers and they're like [adopts idiotic drawl], 'Well, she can't really play,' but it's like saying Link Wray couldn't really play a guitar. Come on, where does rock'n'roll come from?"

Meg's onstage debut came on 14 July 1997 - "Bastille Day" in White Stripes folklore. She joined Jack to play three songs to ten people at an ex-drag bar in Detroit called the Gold Dollar.

Jack used to talk at great length about the Detroit scene. But things have changed. He can't remember the last time he visited the city. When asked about his feelings towards it, he says, matter-of-factly, "The flag of Detroit has on it in Latin, 'It shall rise from the ashes.' That's Detroit's hope and one day it will be achieved." He speaks in a resigned fashion. "I really don't have any opinion about Detroit. I've said my piece about it in the past, I've probably said too much..."

Having spent so long as one of the city's most vocal ambassadors, Jack is now operating a scorched earth policy on his past. His memories have been tarnished by two particular instances. The first was a well-publicised fight at a concert in 2003, when he punched out Jason Stollsteimer, lead singer of local band the Von Bondies. Three years later, producer Jim Diamond unsuccessfully sued the band for unpaid royalties. Jack doesn't want to talk much about either incident. "The only regrets I have are people who I was a little too nice to in the past. I regret friendships that drained me of energy that I could have been using to do something better with my time."
White is adamant that there's nothing he'd change about the White Stripes' career so far. "You couldn't play a chess match better than how this band unfolded," he says with a smile. The couple divorced amicably in March 2000 and decided to keep playing together, releasing their second album, De Stijl, three months later. A year later they became arguably the hottest band in the world.

The Stripes' international success came thanks to a dynamite combination of raw talent, impeccable critical credentials and a hell of a lot of British music-press hype. "It was strange," says Jack of his time spent promoting their breakthrough record White Blood Cells in 2001. "We thought it was a fluke thing and the press weren't going to care about us next week. It made us worried for a while because we had such a great thing going on our own. We thought that from then on we were going to be known as the band that was popular for a month."
Undoubtedly, media interest was also piqued by the "are they/aren't they" nature of the couple's relationship. Anyone who knew them from their Detroit days wasn't fooled, but the world's press latched on to the story. Initially, they seemed to use their unusual relationship as a smoke screen: if people couldn't get past the red/white thing and the sister/ex-wife thing, they weren't worth speaking to. On their first visit to England, Jack offered a prize to the first journalist who asked, "How long have you two been brother and sister?" What's intriguing ç is that even after all these years, countless album sales and increasing fame, Jack and Meg still maintain their band's mythology. Does Jack ever wish he'd never started the whole charade? A pause. Jack looks at me. "I don't know what you're talking about!"

Enigmatic he might be, but Jack doesn't mind talking about less musical matters. He tells me he's a fan of early Saturday Night Live and went to see Martin Short's musical Fame Becomes Me on Broadway. He's set to play Elvis Presley on screen in Walk Hard, a parody of Hollywood rock biopics. He once wanted to record a music video for "The Hardest Button To Button" based on the film of Thomas Edison killing an elephant using a Tesla coil (Jim Jarmusch was going to direct, Philip Seymour Hoffman was to star). He didn't watch TV for a year when he was on tour with the Raconteurs, but was impressed by Planet Earth's high-definition photography. He gave up smoking through willpower alone and hasn't touched an American Spirit in three years.

The strangest thing he's received from a fan is a set of White Stripes Russian dolls, right down to inch-high Jack and Megs, which the band hopes to put into production. Jack collects and curates taxidermy. His last acquisition was a huge American bison head, which he can't work out how to hang "without it falling down and killing someone". He must be the last American alive not to own a mobile phone. He's currently enjoying "the best book I've ever read, even though it's not for everyone". It's Harpo Marx's autobiography Harpo Speaks. He appears sincere.

All this he relates with good humour and the occasional snigger. He's content and doesn't care who knows it. "I'm really happy to be where I am right now. I'm really happy to be down South. It's revitalised me. Moving to Nashville is the best thing I ever did."

***

The suburb of Berry Hill doesn't look like much. With a population of just 700, this collection of former army barracks feels like somewhere you might raise an obedient, patriotic American family. The neighbourhood includes a sturdily constructed children's fort, shops that specialise in herbal supplements, antique dolls or "PraiseBanners" (huge flags for the devotionally minded). But this is the beating musical heart of Nashville, a mere 40 minutes' drive away from the Broadway honky-tonk bars. Behind closed doors are more than 40 recording studios, ranging from slick audio temples to the tiniest one-man-and-his-Mac set-ups. Blackbird Studios is the premier Nashville recording location and even that has an unmarked front door.

Looming over the reception is Jim Marshall's portrait of Johnny Cash, giving the finger to the camera, the warden at San Quentin and, in an advert placed in a March 1998 issue of Billboard magazine, the Nashville country music establishment. As I walk in, a purple-shirted cowboy removes his toothpick in order to deliver precise instructions on taco preparation to a long-suffering receptionist. A bony Southern belle in a velour tracksuit attempts to halt the progress of a Chihuahua called George.

This is where, for three weeks in January and February this year, Jack and Meg recorded Icky Thump. They're already tired of explaining the album's strange title. It's their version of the Northern England expression of surprise, "ecky thump", presumably introduced to them first by his wife Karen. And anyway, it could be worse. Jack says they did think about calling it Thermal Cracking Counterthrust.

Jack and Meg were joined in the studio by a portrait of long-dead bluesman Charley Patton. "It's just good to have Charley in the room - two dimensionally or whatever," explains Jack. "It's good to think of where he was coming from and where his head was at about music." Although Jack often finds himself preaching the blues to disbelieving rock journalists, even he admits that Patton's music can be a tricky listen. "Charley's a tough sell, man, because you can't really make out what he's saying. But it's so interesting and powerful." Meg chips in, "It's like a step programme - you've got to take a couple of steps before you get to Charley. You might want to start with Hendrix or Howlin' Wolf."

Jack is keen to stress the graft involved in making the record. "I'd love to take the easy route and say, 'Yeah, it was a blast, man! We were high-fiving each other after every take.' It's work, you know? Most of it needs to be a struggle in order for something interesting to happen." In the past, the band has always favoured retro recording studios, such as Liam Watson's all-analogue Toe Rag studio in east London, where they made Elephant in 2003. This is the first time the band has recorded in a state-of-the-art studio. "It's very easy to get sidetracked with all the toys that are in there," says Jack.

"They had one of those machines that grinds the coffee," says Meg, mock horrified. "A terrible thing!"

The band's decision to record in retro environments has often caused them to be seen as Luddites. "People don't realise that if we say, 'We'd rather not record our record on Pro Tools,' we're not saying, 'No one should record on computer ever!' I don't really care what people do. You make your album your way! I'm not going to fight you for it."

It may have been recorded under contemporary conditions, but Icky Thump is unmistakably a White Stripes album. Meg's thunderous drumming is present and correct and Jack's fearsome guitar shows no sign of mellowing. "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" is a gasoline-fuelled torch song and future country-radio staple. "Conquest", an ancient Corky Robbins song once covered by Patti Page, has become a Latin-laced, thumping rock wig out. Harder, heavier and with the Led Zeppelin influence more evident than ever, this could be the record that breaks the White Stripes out of the hipster ghetto and into the arms of the kind of people who drink in Nashville's bars.

It certainly deserves to be: Icky Thump is arguably the best album of 2007 so far. It is certainly the most ambitious. The album manages to combine the overtly political (the title track) with the deeply personal ("Effect And Cause"). It is elusive (I suspect even Meg doesn't understand "St Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)") and occasionally gloriously simple (the bluesy battering ram of "Little Cream Soda"). It is also great fun: you'd never get Arctic Monkeys pretending to be scrap merchants or Timbaland recruiting a trumpeter from a local Mexican restaurant. Having sold more than 12 million albums, Jack hopes the band's existing fans will find much to love here. "This band is not supposed to evolve. We're supposed to stay in our box. It is the same question you ask when you listen to one of the later Led Zeppelin albums - what do you want from them? You always hope for the best - you always hope they focus on your favourite thing about them." In this, Icky Thump is an unqualified success. Jack and Meg have taken your favourite White Stripes songs and refashioned them into something wondrous and new.

What the band haven't done, however, is gone mainstream. One of the strangest tracks on Icky Thump is "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn", which Jack decided needed some Scottish instrumentation. "Bagpipes are due a revival," he says. "They are a very sombre instrument, very beautiful in the right context." For this, White enlisted the help of a 52-year-old, London-born, Tennessee-based bagpiper, Jim Drury. Drury, Pipe Major of the Tennessee Scots Pipe Band, couldn't be more complimentary about his experience with Jack. "You don't do well in Nashville unless you're a good guy," he says. "You have to have social graces. I'd never met Jack before so didn't know what to expect. But I'd heard stories, y'know? I was impressed how musical he was and how agreeable he was to changing things on the fly. We spent three hours together and had a nice conversation in the engineer booth. We're kinda similar because my family is in Neasden and his wife is from England, so we had a conversation about that."

Part of Jack's new-found happiness is undoubtedly due to his marriage. Lancashire-born Karen Elson is a former supermodel, current art-house darling and unofficial ambassador for auburn-haired women everywhere. She's unconventional even by supermodel standards. Much hay is made when Kate Moss duets with Pete Doherty, but how about a model who has her own cabaret troupe, the Citizens Band, and has recorded her own version of Serge Gainsbourg's smutty classic, "Je T'aime... Mois Non Plus"?

It's no coincidence that Jack's new record is full of tributes to women who share his wife's hair colour. "Is this our ginger-loving record? Yeah!" says Jack, with a shy smile. "They're the most interesting to me. I'm always curious about redheads. There is something different about them. Some cultures, such as in the Orient, fear them. It's interesting what they find so shocking." He tells me he hasn't played his family the record yet. "They can spend ten bucks and buy it themselves!"

Marrying a Brit seems like the ultimate expression of the band's Anglophile tendency. Could he imagine him and Karen moving back to Oldham? "No, because you still haven't discovered the art of heating and cooling!" says Jack. "As Brendan [Benson] said to me on the last Raconteurs tour, 'England is a country where you still have two separate faucets for hot and cold. But you turn the hot and, in three seconds, it's boiling water - so you pretty much have a three-second window to wash your hands.'" Meg laughs: "You Brits are very clean - but you like to torture yourselves."

***

On the day of the GQ shoot, Bob Dylan's beloved Nashville skyline is the colour of a ripe bruise. We drive out of the city, past Nashville's branch of Déjà Vu Showgirls ("1000s of beautiful girls. And 3 ugly ones") and head to Franklin, the "Number One Small Town in Tennessee". We're sliding down the buckle of the Bible Belt: every other building seems to be a vast, mall-like church. We're overtaken by a Cadillac. The numberplate reads simply: "Clergy".

Our Fifties diner is pretty authentic, but for the Wi-Fi connection. Meg orders a guacamole burger and a Coke, while Jack goes for a turkey club with a vanilla malt. Perhaps he's steering clear of the Real Thing for a reason. His decision last year to record a track entitled "Love Is The Truth" for a Coca-Cola ad was met with condemnation in precious indie circles. But he's pragmatic. "It's really hard to talk about that because every time it feels like I'm giving excuses, even if I say, 'No comment.'" His eyes meet mine. "I take everything on a case-by-case basis. I thought the visuals were beautiful and wrote the song for it." Predictably, it stars another redhead.

He's tired of the lazy condemnation of critics. "In the long run, it didn't really matter. They only played the thing one time. And Coca-Cola hated the song! If it wasn't for the internet, no one over here would know it existed!"
Jack feels this incident is typical of misconceptions about the White Stripes. "Certain people made us the poster boy and girl for lo-fi, indie, garage music, anti-this and anti-that. I don't remember us saying those things." He's had enough. "That is how you think Jack White is - go ahead and love that guy. I don't care. Don't matter to me. But this Jack White is writing a song for this Coke ad."

On set, Jack is getting into character as a soda jerk. "Have I gone Method? Always, every time," he says with a smile. He takes particular delight in art-directing Meg, instructing her on how to pour the coffee at the requisite rate.

They're an odd proposition, the White Stripes. They clearly care for each other a great deal, even though their friendship is platonic now and their relationship primarily professional. Meg was maid-of-honour at Jack and Karen's wedding, so she's part of his family, in a way.

But they don't live in the same city any more and they don't hang out when they're not working or recording. "It's either zero or 100 per cent," says Jack. On those occasions when they are together, Jack admits they end up mimicking each other's speech patterns and finishing each other's sentences.

Next month marks their ten-year anniversary as a band. They have no plans to retire. Whatever their unusual dynamic is, when they come together as the White Stripes, it works. Perhaps it's best not to ask too many questions. As our time together concludes, I ask Jack what people get wrong about the White Stripes. He considers for a moment, then simply says, "Everything."

Originally published in British GQ in July 2007. Read the original here.