Even though he has been characteristically busy these past few years, Jack White’s first UK show as a solo artist felt like a grand comeback. Since his flagship duo, the White Stripes, petered out in 2007, he has diversified to a near-pathological degree, slotting into parallel combos the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, and launching his own Third Man studio and label in Nashville.
There, according to White’s exhausting logic, he has chosen to “spend some time with the kidsâ€, while also producing around 80 one-off 45rpm records, and 20 live albums. Many struggling young parents may wonder where he found time for all that â€" during afternoon naps, perhaps?
His new solo album, Blunderbuss, sees him finally stepping to the front again, with a bold, lavishly textured sound, which largely abandons the garage-rock fury of old. Yet White’s playful spontaneity remains: for his debut solo shows, he is to tour with two bands, one all-male, the other all-female, and is to decide which one will play each night that morning over breakfast.
At the Forum, on his album’s release day, it was ladies’ night. Surrounded by six elegant damsels in sky-blue lacy dresses, White took centre-stage, black-clad, and kerranging out the chords of the White Stripes’ Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground to rapturous excitement. Here was one of his generation’s few bona-fide guitar heroes, at last reassuming that mantle.
As he duly got stuck into some Blunderbuss material, however, its contrast with the Stripes’ rough-and-ready rock’n’roll became very apparent: songs like the bitter, acoustic-based Love Interruption and the bombastic Weep Themselves to Sleep, were intricately structured.
White seemed at pains to tease out further nuances from his various instrumentalists, most of whom he cherry-picked from 45 sessions with newcomer ensembles. Often they appeared bemused, as he called them into unscripted solos.
Gradually, the early-tour nerves subsided, and the push and pull between White and his hirelings â€" in particular, a fabulously able drummer and double-bassist â€" yielded the intended magic. Ball and Biscuit†arrived in a blizzard of fiery guitar solos; Sixteen Saltines, the current single, was riffy and powerful. Come Seven Nation Army, the crowd were at fever pitch, stamping out the beat, and chanting its world-beating pseudo-bassline.
As White led his ladies into a rousing version of the folk standard Goodnight, Irene, the boys on the subs’ bench may have been wondering anxiously if they’ll be getting a game any time soon.
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