The Spirit Lives (2008)

Originally published by The Fly

There’s a lot to be said for just standing onstage making a right old racket, amps up to 11 and eyes burning with belief as the sweat runs down the distended veins on your temple at the sheer damned visceral explosion inside. 

It’s how I spent a good couple of years in the old band, after all, scrapping around shoddy stages, smashing basses against faces and hammering out claw-fist rhythms in dust-clot basements with graffiti on the walls and piss dripping out from underneath scum-toilet doors.

It’s all well and dandy and a staple of the kind of primal therapy that underpins the motivation of the briny bastards at the bottom, scrabbling around in the purple-thorned undergrowth and revelling in the spirit as much as – more than – the music itself. The process is designed, or undertaken, to provide some kind of conduit to a power that’s hard to pin down but more powerful than anything else when it can be caught.

It is that self-same spirit of independent, alternative and slightly angsty gravel that underpins also a wider vision of music. It’s a spirit that runs through rock n roll music since day one; since Robert Johnson made his pact with devils unspoken at the crossroads, in truth, Johnson’s own muse having been borne on the horrors of the past itself. 

The same spirit and wariness of the establishment that catalysed rhythm and blues, that made Elvis Presley himself at one time a rebel, that fired up the Stones and The Who, that raked through the eyes and hearts of the Velvets, the Stooges, the Lost Boys: the spirit that powered punk rock, and any number of subsequent splinter factions since.

It’s the same spirit, too, that initially fired Jack White: you can hear it every time he explodes into sky-squeal; be it those pained, strained, excruciatingly beautifully fucked vocals or the craziness led by a guitar extortion, exhorting the instrument into greater, flame-filled, harridan-Hendrix flights of dastardly fancy. A sound-sourced grasp out of the darkness that bites and bristles at your neck, and your hair, and the pieces of clay within and it’s petrifying, in the best kind of way. In the White Stripes (if ever they’re going to play again) it is (or was) undeniable, Meg’s dum-dum drumming the simplest of tribal beats round which Jack could weave and tangle and gibber and fly, an instant fix of the primeval urge to blast back at the world in confusion or in joy.

In the slightly more conventional set-up of The Raconteurs his Icarus-soar is more controlled, counterpointed masterfully by Brendon Benson’s more fluid approach and the anchoring basslines beneath. Benson and White together is quite something, two virtuosos in tandem – the craftmaster and the wild-eyed visionary, and when the sparks fly, the venue lights up in astonishment. And when it comes together in something as magnificent as Blue Veins, you can start to understand Robert Johnson’s motivations in the first place.

It’s fair also to say that The Raconteurs would not countenance a gig in an underpowered, underlit, dangerously-wired shitehole. 

And nor should they, because the vibe of which we speak is not dependent on shouting at the spiders or useless, cheap excuses for amps. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, follow that if you just turn it up loud and scream the spirit will appear. And conversely it obviously doesn’t follow that buying a vintage Custom SG and a Marshall 900 will make you play like Angus Young either. We can all reel off lists of over-polished, boring-arsed bands who could do with spending a few gigs running away from irate cowboys, fending off the attentions of over-eager flobbers and generally getting their smooth sides roughed up a bit.

It’s an odd one to pin down, really, which is why the most interesting manifestation of The Spirit at the Liverpool date of The Raconteurs was rather a surprise. It was, of course, there in some of Jack’s more incriminating licks, but that wasn’t quite the whole story. The band played, the sound was sharp and gravelly, and the drapes behind the group shivered, shook and undulated. And I realised: it’s there. In the shadowplay behind the lights there were dancing sprites of pure rock n roll, enticed by the music and the audience and the dusty dressing room, but brought through the portal between netherworlds by all and none of these things.

A little bemused, I looked round the room and ended up quite by chance looking at the lighting engineer who was rocking backwards and forwards, ratty, long, resplendent locks shaking and whirring behind his nodding head. I could see the whites of his eyes but the pupils were enormous. He was possessed by it and as I smiled and watched his fingers flit over the lighting desk like Stevie Wonder plays the Rhodes I realised that the engineer was a conduit, too. His desk was his instrument, the lights the manifestation of the same primitive urge of expression that Lemmy has when he ‘sings’ and Future Of The Left flirt with gleefully.

 In one split second a cymbal crashed, Jack White’s craw blasted unearthliness, Benson’s guitar squealed and a strobe flared vicious vindication. A gasp emanated from somewhere, and I was surprised to find out it was my own.

Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge to turn and face the lighting desk. I shivered: the engineer was staring right at me and I felt, I knew, I was staring into the eyes of a lion. Intimidating, powerful, and proud, it was a gaze of challenge and timelessness, of a world where rather more immediate rules of life and/or death applied.

I stood, transfixed, caught in the beam. The blood drained from my face; my heart missed a beat. I felt insignificant, and infinite, and I understood everything was part of a bigger, never-ending tale that was never truly meant to be fully spoken of; that never could be expressed aside from only partly in the occasional instant of cymbal-crash, lights-flash, guitar-smash. Suddenly the venue was silent, and time was irrelevant, and the world fell asunder, itself in thrall.

Point duly made, the lighting engineer shook his head and his dreads clicked as he looked away, his fingers prowled back to the vista of his desk, the venue snapped back into sharp focus as the crowd’s roar seeped back into my consciousness - and the band played on.