True stripes

It's 20 years since the White Stripes frontman was anointed as rock royalty. Out of lockdown, he has two new albums and is on the road again

- Dave Simpson

WHEN JACK WHITE WAS 14, HE WAS ALL set to become a priest. "I'd been accepted at the seminary and everything," he grins, and it's not too hard ing with missionary zeal, even with his hair dyed blue, as it is today. “But something happened to me in that summer. The priests seemed really old and I thought, 'Who's gonna speak for my generation?"

White was raised a Catholic, and his conversation is still peppered with words such as “sinner” and “judgment" - but that didn't stop him changing his mind about holy orders. "To be fair, they don't turn anyone into a priest unless they really want to be one,” he says. “I never got the calling."

Instead, of course, he found music. Born Jack Gillis in downtown Detroit, to a Polish mother and Scottish Canadian father who both worked for the church, he was the youngest of 10 siblings. They would subject him to the usual indignities, such as knocking down the card houses he liked to build, “because that's how brothers and sisters are”. But his brothers had a drum kit, which he played from the age of five, before graduating to other instruments in his mid-teens when his father unexpectedly brought home a piano. "That piano, which I have in front of me now, changed my life.” He never thought he could make a living out of music, though. Even when he joined bands and was on "so many bills people were sick of me”, he would hear musicians talk about going in the studio and think: “Is your dad a millionaire or something?” His expected career was furniture. "When I was 16, I would have bet $1,000 that I'd only ever have an upholstery shop."