“But she did and conquered it in her own way. “She’s so delicate and such a sweet person that you’d never think she’d go up on stage,” White says, warmly. Similarly, no reason was given when the Stripes ceased performing in 2009 and in 2011 announced a split that was subsequently attributed to Meg’s stage fright. “You have to explain your relationship to everybody. “To get famous, especially in duos, whether it’s Sonny and Cher or whoever, everything is up for grabs to be exploited,” White says. Having divorced before the breakthrough, the couple pretended to be brother and sister to deflect intrusive questions (continuing the misdirection even after some sleuth produced their marriage certificate). The follow up, Elephant, released in 2003, was a UK No 1, and reached No 6 in the US, triggering an imperial period lasting almost a decade. That’s not what happened.” White Blood Cells, released in July 2001 and featuring the breakthrough single Hotel Yorba and the riotous Fell in Love With a Girl, saw them become one of the hottest bands in the world. “We thought we’d just play with a couple of garage rock bands and go home. “We were staying on the drummer from Thee Headcoats’ floor that whole trip,” White remembers. I thought, ‘Oh wow, please keep doing that,’ never thinking, ‘Oh we’re going to write songs or form a band or play on stage or anything.’” But they did all that, and after two under-the-radar albums they suddenly exploded during a 2001 visit to the UK, when DJ John Peel said they were the most exciting thing he had heard since Jimi Hendrix. One day, he recalls, “to help me out while I was setting up a microphone or something”, Meg got behind the drums. They married in 1996 and he took her surname. He was still at school when he met Meg White, the woman who would become the other half of the White Stripes. Where the White Stripes presented in red and white (inspired by peppermint candy), orange and blue is a homage to the multitude of movie posters, notably Star Wars, that used “supposedly the most attractive colours to boost ticket sales, hyuk, hyuk”. It’s decked out in dazzling orange stripes, which make for quite a combination with his blue hair. Today, wearing a Batman T-shirt, White, 46, is video-calling from another project, the bowling alley on his Nashville estate, which he designed himself. I was recording music in my bedroom, but nobody ever came up and said to my parents, ‘Wow, this kid’s interesting.’ Nobody patted me on the back for any of it.” But that didn’t stop him, or slow him down. I had the upholstery apprenticeship and a business in the basement. When I was 19, I was a drummer in two different bands. “It’s more in control of me,” he says, “but it’s always been like this. He is the first to admit that he isn’t always in control of what he calls a “compulsion” to create. The White Stripes performing in Madison Square Garden in New York in 2007. “I also made a good cup of coffee once,” he chuckles. A fourth, Fear of the Dawn, arrives this month with another, Entering Heaven Alive, following in July. His three solo albums have all been US No 1s. He fronted the Raconteurs and played drums in the Dead Weather, and has been a producer and video-maker, while his eclectic Third Man operation takes in everything from a record label and record shops to a publishing imprint. Within a decade, however, his supercharged garage rock duo the White Stripes was a global phenomenon, and he’s barely paused since. “When I was 16 I would have bet $1,000 that I’d only ever have an upholstery shop.” Even when he joined bands and was on “so many bills people were sick of me”, he would hear musicians talk about going in the studio and think: “Is your dad a millionaire or something?” His expected career was furniture. “That piano, which I have in front of me now, changed my life.” He never thought he could make a living out of music, though. But his brothers had a drum kit, which he played from the age of five, before graduating to other instruments in his mid-teens when most of the siblings had left home and his father unexpectedly brought home a piano. They would subject him to the usual indignities, such as knocking down the card houses he liked to build, “because that’s how brothers and sisters are”. Born Jack Gillis in downtown Detroit, to a Polish mother and Scottish Canadian father who both worked for the church, he was the youngest of 10 siblings.
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