7th November 2012, The Empress Ballroom, Blackpool
We have come to expect a lot from Jack White, and it’s easy to get excited at the prospect of this sold out concert in the same location as the iconic White Stripes’ Under Blackpool Lights release from 2004. The venue is ornate, gorgeous even and almost as sinister as the ballroom in The Shining. Jack White is solo now, although it didn’t look like that to me, his six piece female band The Peacocks were very much a part of the show. White is a performer with presence, a front-man in every sense of the word, his various collaborations always find him object of the gaze, no matter how generous he has been in attempting to share the limelight. The camaraderie evident in The Raconteurs was replaced here by something altogether strange and engaging. White orchestrated from centre stage, dressed in a dark blue suit and white braces. He interacted with each band member in a charming and flirtatious manner, and there was chemistry between him and these accomplished musicians.
The show felt choreographed and theatrical at times. The third song in, Love Interruption, was a sensuously charged duet with Ruby Amanfu, he whispers to her, pauses, then sings, ‘I want love to walk right up and bite me, grab a hold of me and fight me, leave me dying on the ground’, she twirls his hair, the stage is dramatically lit, it’s a spectacle. When White takes a seat at the piano for ‘I Guess I Should Go To Sleep’, it’s a change of pace, he’s side-stage, under the spotlight and he seems like a pretty good piano player, but when he starts messing around, hitting wrong notes the crowd like that even more.
He moves through the set, interacting with the band in his easy, charismatic way, they are a band with style, well-dressed and sleek. He barely interacts at all with the audience, ‘Blackpool how have you been? Very nice to be
back’, the crowd are happy with that, the show is amazing but he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it nearly as much as the crowd are. It’s a good value set, over twenty songs, there’s a Hank Williams cover ‘You Know That I know’, along with the covers that are known and loved and hardly seem like covers at all anymore, ‘Death Letter’ and ‘Cannon’; one of White’s talents is making us forget that his covers were ever anyone else’s to begin with; there are also tracks from The Raconteurs, Dead Weather and Danger Mouse. One thing that stood out was how the songs from Blunderbuss, his latest solo album, were as enthusiastically received as White Stripes favourites, and that’s quite something.
There’s always a push for ‘Seven Nation Army’ when Jack White is on stage no matter who he is performing with and tonight was no exception, from the first riff, now a football chant, the building (not for the first time that night) was shaking. By this time the mosh pit contingent had been gently nudged and manoeuvred together into the middle by the largely sophisticated phone-toting audience. White’s roadie had announced at the outset that photographs would be available on the website and not to take them during the show – White’s got something of a reputation for being tetchy about such things, a purist who has also been known to comment about the negative role of the internet in music on more than one occasion. Before I set off tonight I was looking at details of the venue and read about an inscription above the stage, ‘Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear’, from the poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ by Shakespeare, I couldn’t see it, the stage backdrop was in the way, but I knew it was there, and that’s what I like about the internet. Music is about music, I know, but there’s something to be said for the myth-making machine too; a girl outside was taking a photograph of the empty tour bus; Jack White had not yet left the building.
Janet Rogerson is a PhD Student in the Centre for New Writing. Her pamphlet, A Bad Influence Girl was published by The Rialto in 2012.