About the White Stripes

I’m pretty sure the White Stripes were one of the last bands to tickle my fancy at the time they were getting big. (I got into the Magnetic Fields and Maher Shalal Hash Baz at around the same time, but they’d already been around for longer and never went on to enjoy/suffer the level of success as Jack and Meg did.) So I must admit to having experienced a warm, almost proprietorial glow when they were accepted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if that was tempered by the faint hope that Jack (Meg was absent) might have had the guts to tell the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to stick itself up its own self-satisfied arse.

He didn’t, obviously, but in a way he did, by namechecking a whole load of bands that influenced the Stripes but haven’t been similarly honoured. What I always found excitingly different about the White Stripes was the way they fused single-minded purism (vintage instruments, analogue recording) with a cheerful postmodernism that fused any number of apparently jarring genres. 

And his list carries on that eclectic tradition, combining those whose effect on the band are obvious from space (the Troggs, Merle Haggard, Beefheart), those who remain so obscure I had to look them up to check they weren’t some sort of arch in-joke (oh, that Dexter Romweber, right) and those whose inclusion is, shall we say, just a tad surprising (Jethro sodding fluteybollocks Tull???). But the whole thing did remind me why I fell a little bit in love with them 25 years ago and why I still hold out some forlorn hope of a similar romance in the autumn of my years.