Fair play to Jack White. After the White Stripes dissolved in 2011 he really did move on: country rock, synths, Q-Tip collaborations. Only now, with his sixth solo album, No Name, has he returned to the well of raw and riotous blues-rock delivered in the style of a possessed carny, and bagged his best reviews in years. Even his hair has regressed from an aqua-blue quiff to that old crow-black mop. True to the album’s guerrilla release campaign, he’s playing the kind of venues he outgrew around 9/11.
It has to be said White is not messing about. His band – drummer Patrick Keeler, bassist Dominic Davis and keyboardist Bobby Emmett, who looks like a defrosted Ramone – is one he might have formed back in 1997 if not for Meg White and conceptual purity: more conventional but thrillingly feral in the mode of his Detroit forebears the Stooges and MC5. Each song climaxes in the style of a building being demolished, then it’s straight into the next. At times they sound like a hooligan Rage Against the Machine or a basement-dwelling AC/DC. New songs like the irresistible, hilarious Archbishop Harold Holmes tumble into irradiated White Stripes classics, sprouting outrageous guitar solos and cacophonous outros.
Burly in black, White is a virtuoso noisemaker, a magnificent weirdo and a true believer in this whole rock’n’roll thing. He baits the crowd like a wrestler, cries “Can I hear an amen?” and declares that anyone who doesn’t move will be arrested. At one terrifying moment he points at the scribbling reviewers on the balcony’s front row and scolds us for not clapping along. Down below, the moshpit bounces like a trampoline.
At times during the 45-minute encore, the relentless onslaught threatens to get exhausting but there is always another energy spike. The rinsed-to-death riff from Seven Nation Army sounds volcanic when White is leading it, while the Raconteurs’ powerpop gem Steady As She Goes swells to Godzilla proportions. The air is humid with sweat; ears are ringing. “This is the kind of rock’n’roll you’re not getting to get at Wembley Stadium,” White brags in a possible sideswipe at the Oasis reunion. Amen.
