Jack White may like things simple, but he also likes them 'right'. For the first night of the 'Elephant' world tour, it's the little details which are most immediately striking. The road crew, soundman and vast security guard in black suits and red shirts. The 'Felix The Cat' cartoons projected onto a giant screen. The red drapes and red and white guitars. The neatness and uniformity of it all.
Tonight, though, The White Stripes brand is being presented to a new, bigger market. With 'Elephant' at Number One in the UK, Jack and Meg White have transcended their role as a rock'n'roll phenomenon, and become authentic rock'n'roll superstars. Sometimes, it's hard to imagine quite how this has happened: how have a bare-bones duo playing garage blues gatecrashed the mainstream without wavering from their morally rigorous code of conduct?
But the answer, of course, is brutally straightforward. The White Stripes are flat-out astonishing. About a minute into their second song, 'Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground', it becomes apparent that their minimalist aesthetic has now been magnified to huge new proportions. Somehow, they've retained the spirit and edge and deviousness honed in grimy punk clubs and made a new kind of stadium rock out of it. With a crowd of such diversity and devotion, and the terrace chanting of "Number One!" greeting Jack and Meg's arrival, it seems as if The White Stripes have become the people's band entirely on their own terms. It's a glorious spectacle.
The last band to effect such a transition with their credibility intact was Nirvana. Jack White, though, is no Kurt Cobain. Rather than demons and honesty, there's shownmanship and sleight-of-hand. In fact, his theatrical eccentricities get greater with every tour, just as his trousers seem to become correspondingly tighter: in this case, a dashing pair with one leg red, the other black and some very risky definition round the crotch. Talking is at a minimum. Instead, he tears through a handful of 'Elephant' songs - 'The Hardest Button To Button' is notably murderous - sundry covers (by Dolly Parton, Bacharach & David, Detroit contemporaries Brendan Benson and The Soledad Brothers) and old songs, reinvented with a new volume and menace.
Meg, too, appears to be more confident than before, even if her still-fragile arm (broken only a few weeks ago) means she seems to be playing virtually one-handed at times. When her supposed brother stalks over to her kit to scream 'I Smell A Rat', she sits erect, throws her head back and juts out her chin, matching him pose for pose. 'Cold, Cold Night' is hesitant but beautiful, with her stood awkwardly centre stage, hand on hip. By the end, she's waltzing round the stage with Jack, dancing to the extraordinary and completely deserved level of applause.
It's a typically playful, touching and confusing moment, the sort of iconic vignette that The White Stripes excel at. A few minutes earlier, there was another one; a performance of 'Death Letter' that is all melodrama and savagery, a vivisection of the old Son House blues that ends with Jack throwing his mic down, playing ferocious slide guitar on the floor, then staggering to his feet, climbing onto the drums and, finally, slinging his guitar over Meg's head. Rarely has a bout of instrument trashing seemed so euphoric and necessary. And rarely has a band, when confronted with so much hyperbole and expectation, managed to raise their game so effortlessly.
The White Stripes: still good, then.
