By GRAHAM REID
Jack White and his with sister Meg make up Detroit duo White Stripes, players of raw rock'n'roll, pristine pop and with a mainline to old blues. And who end their brief New Zealand tour with rowdy dates at the Kings Arms tonight and tomorrow with the Rock'n'Roll Machine and others.
Your new De Stijl album covers musical bases from pop to blues by Son House and Blind Willie McTell. What music did you grow up on?
I listened to rock'n'roll and my father got me into big band drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. I didn't get into the blues until I was 16 or 17. I wasn't consciously looking for something but when I listened it was so real, nothing fake about it. It seemed there was no way people nowadays could do what those guys were doing. They weren't putting on airs and were just telling a story. Son House really had an effect on me.
Have you met any of these blues heroes or are they all dead?
Most of them are. Son House is buried here in Detroit. I've been to his grave.
You didn't do the Spinal Tap thing, sing at the grave?
No, I didn't.
Is De Stijl a fair calling-card of what we could expect live, because there's a swag of melodic pop there, too?
About half'n'half, from that and the first album. There are not a lot of high tempo crowd-pleasers on De Stijl so we play stuff from the first album which is more rock'n'roll. Any time we try to play slow stuff Meg and I like, it's not a live thing. People don't respond. We sneak it in here and there like medicine.
There's some almost McCartney-like pop on De Stijl. That's a compliment I hope?
Oh yeah, that's great. He's my favourite Beatle, which isn't fashionable, but I thought he was the best musician in that band. Our first album was so angry we didn't want to do that again and wanted to work on some new ideas.
There are a whole group of bands of your ilk, small locally but connecting with an international audience.
Yeah. Someone told me one time if you are providing a service, people who want it will find you. If you make napkin-holders a rich lady who wants them will find you somehow. People who make music that people want to hear will be found.
I know De Stijl was a minimalist art movement, but why call an album that? Deliberately arty?
That's my favourite art movement. They were working on how simple could they get art to be and I thought that's what we were doing musically as a two-piece. It was that question of "how simple do we want this band to be? When do we add piano or overdub, and can we keep doing this without people getting sick of hearing the same thing?"
All those questions were around. De Stijl had to stop because they got so simple there was nowhere else to go. It seemed an apt analogy.
Down to the bare minimalism with the White Stripes
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