© jackwhiteiii.com / David James Swanson
After I’d been deprived of live music for nearly two years, courtesy of Covid-19, my luck certainly enjoyed an upswing this mid-November. On November 12th, I got the chance to see Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium. Two days later, Jack White rolled into town on his Supply Chain Issues Tour, which kicked off in White’s home city of Detroit on April 8th and concluded three days ago in Christchurch, New Zealand, with five continents visited along the way.
The Singaporean leg of the gig was held in the Capitol Theatre in the Capitol Building, the picturesque 1929 neoclassical building on Stamford Road, whose refurbished interior also contains an atrium of ‘modern and classical dining establishments’, a retail mall and the luxury Kempinski Hotel. My partner and I had tickets for the upper circle, getting to which was a little weird. The theatre’s entrance is in the middle of the atrium, among the eateries. For the circle seats, we were directed through a door out of the foyer and into the atrium again, up a couple of modern escalators that climbed the atrium’s side, and through another door that brought us back inside the theatre.
The theatre – whose auditorium retains its 1929-vintage appearance – quickly filled up. It would have been nice to report that the crowd was immensely varied and contained everyone, to quote White’s most famous song, “from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell”, but it largely consisted of Western expats. These included both suited, sombre ones who’d just arrived from work and casually dressed, hanging-out, shooting-the-breeze ‘dude bro’ ones. Unfortunately, the yaketty guys sitting directly in front of us belonged to the second faction. There were a few Singaporean-looking folk in attendance, though, such as a guy admirably clad in a death-metal T-shirt and ragged denim shorts, with long hair and an impressive amount of tattoos; or a bloke in a white T-shirt I could see below in the stalls, pressed against the front of stage, who reacted to the music with such berserk jigging and gyrating that several times I thought he was going to start a fight with people he crashed into on either side of him. He must have been Jack White’s biggest fan in Singapore.
White and his three band-members – bassist Dominic John Davis, keyboardist Quincy McCrary and drummer Daru Jones – came on stage to the strains of the MC5s’ Kick Out the Jams (1969), a famously hectic song whose hecticness, it’s fair to say, they matched during their two-hour, 23-song set. They delivered a gloriously intense and relentless barrage of rock ‘n’ roll noise. Commendably, they also achieved a balance between performing with utter musical virtuosity and, from the look of things, having an extremely good time. McCrary’s keyboards were agreeably high in the mix, giving the band’s sound, to my ears at least, a faintly Doors-ian or Stranglers-esque tinge. Meanwhile, kudos to the instrument tech team, who had their work cut out scurrying constantly about the stage and making sure all the instruments and equipment, including White’s fleet of guitars, were functioning correctly and bearing up to the strain.
Dressed in a dark suit, white boots and a patterned, chest-revealing shirt and sporting a slicked-back shock of hair whose colour can only be described as ‘metallic blue’, White resembled a character Nicolas Cage might have played in a sweaty, disreputable thriller directed in the early 1990s by Brian De Palma. Some of his more histrionic stage-moves evoked the mighty Nicolas Cage too, come to think of it.
The set gave a neat overview of White’s musical career. The songs played ranged from Cannon, off the White Stripes’ eponymous debut album in 1999, to two items from White’s last solo album, Entering Heaven Alive, released in July this year. In fact, about half the songs came from White’s solo work, Blunderbuss (2012), Lazaretto (2014), Boarding House Reach (2018), Fear of the Dawn (April 2022) and the afore-mentioned Entering Heaven Alive. Of these I’m familiar only with Blunderbuss. That’s not because I stopped liking or lost interest in White after 2012. It’s just that during the last decade I’ve lived in places where it’s been difficult to keep up with contemporary Western music. However, the solo stuff fitted in seamlessly alongside the older stuff performed, which mostly came from his celebrated noughties band the White Stripes.
The bulk of that White Stripes material was found on their third and fourth albums, 2001’s White Blood Cells (Dirty Leaves and Dirty Ground, Fell in Love with a Girl and We’re Going to be Friends) and 2003’s Elephant (Ball and Biscuit, The Hardest Button to Button and the inevitable Seven Nation Army). Nothing appeared from their last two albums, Get Behind Me Satan (2005) and Icky Thump (2007), which at least meant we were spared their rather fearful version of Corky Robbins’ Conquest (1952), the one with the bullfighting-themed video, which I’ve always thought was a rare White Stripes misfire. Bravely, Seven Nation Army was played not as a crowd-pleasing finale but as the opening number. It did resurface late on, though, after the band had ended their main set and left the stage and before they returned for their encore – because the crowd started chanting its memorable riff: “DAAAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAAAH-DAAAH!” At this point, I tried to get a chorus of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” going, but nobody played ball.
Also aired were songs by the bands White played in during the noughties that weren’t the White Stripes – the Raconteurs’ jaunty Steady as She Goes (2006), and the Dead Weather’s ominously organ-heavy I Cut Like a Buffalo (2009). The one song of the evening not to belong in any way to the Jack White canon was a cover of 1992’s 7 by Prince and the New Power Generation. It didn’t surprise me that he included something by the diminutive Minneapolitan musician-singer-songwriter. Prince, with his tireless prolificity and penchant for new projects, self-invention and basically never standing still, strikes me as an obvious role-model for White.
© Third Man / J / XL
Neither did it surprise me that Another Way to Die, the song he did with Alicia Keys as the theme for the unloved Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008), was left off the setlist tonight. While it’s better than the anodyne, play-it-safe themes the Bond producers have used on the most recent films, Another Way isn’t great. But it would have been fun for me to hear a second Bond theme played live in 48 hours, after Guns N’ Roses performed Live and Let Die (1974) on November 12th.
Talking of which, the audience was told in plain terms before the gig not to use phones to film or take pictures. This meant, mercifully, we were spared the experiences of the Guns N’ Roses concert, where often it seemed I was peering at the stage through a galaxy of phone-lights – or indeed, through a galaxy of Samsung Galaxy phone-lights. Audience members were encouraged instead to obtain official photos from White’s website, which is what I’ve done for the pictures at the top and bottom of this entry.
Actually, looking through the site’s gallery of photos from the Singapore gig, I see that the tour photographer, David James Swanson, managed to snap one of the guy in the white T-shirt who was moshing crazily in the stalls. I bet he’s happy about that.
