Article

Culture

Music

18 October 2024

5 min read

Jack White’s breaking the biggest rule in rock 'n' roll

What if the greatest cultural moments were the ones barely anyone saw?

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A close-up of the black label of a blue vinyl record

If one of the most famous rockstars on the planet is playing the best shows of his life, and no one is there to witness it – is he really playing them?

I ask because Jack White, one of the most celebrated and iconic musicians of the 21st century, is playing the best shows of his career. The thing is, barely anyone knows that they’re happening. Not because they don’t care, but because he’s made it that way.

This is White’s ‘No Name’ tour: a critically celebrated string of shows that almost nobody is going to.

And therein lies the magic.

In the summer of this year, he released his ‘No Name’ album with no press, no marketing, and no apparent plans for a tour. Instead, Jack released this body of work into the world and simply told his fans to tell their friends about it – ah, word of mouth, the marketing strategy of old.

It must have worked, because the nameless album was incredibly well received by critics and fans alike. Apparently, the ever-enigmatic Jack White has still got it. And now finally – finally - some live shows are being announced.

Kind of.

Each show is being announced only days in advance, the marketing is non-existent, the venues are tiny, and the tickets are… affordable.

What is this? Some kind of cruel trick?

It’s all so odd, so seemingly illogical, that Jack has had to confirm that this is it. This is no trick, no gimmick. This is, in fact, the tour. Reassuring his fans via social media, he wrote

‘Lotta folk asking about when we are going to announce ‘tour dates’, well, we don’t know what to tell you but the tour already started at the Legion a couple of weeks ago… People keep saying that these are ‘Pop up shows’ we’ve been playing, well, you can call them whatever you want, but we are on tour right now.’

He added,

‘These are the ‘shows.’ We won’t really be announcing dates in advance so much, we will mostly be playing at small clubs, back yard fetes, and a few festivals here and there to help pay for expenses.’

And that’s exactly what he’s been doing. One such show recently took place in Islington Assembly Hall in London – and it’s been hailed as some kind of ‘off-the-cuff wizadry’. That’s quite the review, isn’t it? What’s more impressive: it’s pretty much the only kind of review he’s been getting. I’ve dug deep, and I’m yet to find someone who was in that hall who didn’t leave it completely bewildered by how dazzling of an experience it was. Jack is disobeying all the rules, and it seems to be working in his favour. While on stage in Islington, he told the crowd,

‘This is the kind of rock’n’roll you’re not gonna get at Wembley stadium for £400’

This is an obvious swipe at Oasis’ reunion tour, which will take place next year in stadiums across the country. The tickets to these shows caused somewhat of a storm, as fans were simply priced out of what will no-doubt be a momentous string of events. And this isn’t the reality for Oasis fans alone, ticket prices across the board rose 23 per cent in 2023, which sits on top of the 19 per cent rise in prices since the pandemic. And we in the UK and Europe still have it far cheaper than those in the US. While I was at Taylor Swift’s (not at all cheap) Era’s tour earlier this year, I met a girl who had flown from New York to Cardiff, she explained that doing so was cheaper than trying to watch the same show in New York.

It’s utter madness.

Live music shows are becoming bright and shiny sensory extravaganzas, and the amount it costs to witness them is reflecting that. And listen, I’m not bashing these mega-sized shows. I go to my fair share of them. I look forward to one day telling my grandchildren about that time I nearly got Oasis tickets.

But I can’t help but feel that the real magic is happening elsewhere. It’s happening in the tiny venues, witnessed by tiny audiences, who have paid (comparatively) tiny prices. And I think Jack White’s intimate ‘No Name’ tour might be proving me right.

In 1975, Bob Dylan similarly defied all the ‘rock-star’ rules and embarked upon the now-mythic ‘Rolling Thunder Revue’ tour. For eight months, Dylan drove a tour bus (yes, he actually drove his own tour bus) full of his friends into small towns with small venues. The marketing for each show consisted of paper flyers that were handed out mere days before the event, as if a travelling carnival was about to rock up. It was unusual, to say the least. These shows were notoriously messy, and long, and changeable, and odd.

In short, they were great. Truly great.

The modesty and mystique of it all meant that these shows have passed into legend – the live recordings of these performances are regarded as some of Dylan’s very best work. And so, surely, both Dylan’s and White’s defiant tours teach us something - they teach us that there’s a good kind of small. Indeed, there is a great kind of small. They suggest that ‘big’ doesn’t necessarily (and certainly doesn’t exclusively) equate to ‘success’.

What if rumours, reviews, and recordings of a show played to 2,000 people could have more impact than a show played to 100,000? What if the intimacy and connection formed in town halls and tiny clubs rippled into the decades to come? It’s an upside-down way to think of things, but what if the greatest cultural moments were the ones barely anyone saw? What if (and stay with me here, especially you swifties. I’m one of you) these mega-tours are actually quenching creative mastery? What if the smartest thing an artist could do was defy all the rules? What if humility is the source of all greatness?

We seem to have got to a place where we’re surprised that Islington Assembly Hall could be the backdrop to Jack White doing something truly special. And so, I wonder - it’s proper counter-cultural stuff, but do we need to learn to not despise the small things?

Are Jack and Bob the odd ones, for kidding themselves into thinking that small can still be successful? Or are we the odd ones, for ever assuming otherwise?

Article

Creed

Music

Spiritual formation

3 October 2024

4 min read

Sing, pray, manifest: what’s the difference?

Song, success and the search for someone who loves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A colourful graphic overlay of praying hands over a band playing.

Coldplay.com

No one should be surprised when Coldplay release a song called 'We Pray'. Yes, the band's back catalogue is already peppered with references to the divine, but prayer in song is remarkably unremarkable.

Just do a quick search on Spotify: Coldplay are hardly alone. In recent years our purveyors of prayer have notably also included HAIM and Elda Good. Go a little further back: Leonard Cohen, even Take That and Duke Ellington. Which song do you immediately think of when I mention Bon Jovi? And who could forget Madonna, Dionne Warwick or Andrea Bocelli with Katharine McPhee. Prayer makes good music sales.

A recent poll by Skylight showed that 61 per cent of Americans pray. And, 9 in 10 of those believed they'd received an answer to prayer in the past year. If prayers and songs are both places for us to process emotion, then the genre overlap is hardly surprising.

But when you think about it, these songs at their essence sing about a spiritual practice. The spirituality is sometimes overt, and sometimes prayer is useful as a device for something else (Nick Cave's immortal line: 'I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do…'), but whichever way you slice it, we sing about prayer because prayer is one of our deepest instincts. We get meta about our metaphysics because the divide between the sacred and the secular simply isn't there. 43 per cent of respondents to this recent survey were almost as likely to pray in nature as they were in a house of worship (46 per cent). We pray for all manner of reasons, which is the premise of Coldplay's song, why 'we pray'.

This instinct seems to have also birthed the song itself. ''We Pray sort of wrote itself like some of the good songs do,' Chris Martin recently revealed. 'In Taiwan, in the middle of the night, I woke up and the song was in my head, and I don't know where it came from. So, the sound of it sort of dictated itself and that's all. I just sort of followed the road map that it said.'

The ambiguity of the song's origins also matches the huge scope within the song for the listener to interpret as they wish. Coldplay have fascinatingly added a 'blank verse' version online where people can ad lib their own prayers within the song. This is not unlike the practice of many 'charismatic' worship leaders, providing a space for deeply personal expressions of prayer within a corporate religious experience. And whether you're at Glastonbury or alone with you and your AirPods in the park, the offer is not only to connect with a higher power, but to reflect on why you're doing so at the same time.

What if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer?

We may not all have the musical genius of Martin, but many of us similarly profess an innate desire to pray, regardless of religious beliefs. Studies come and go showing that praying can also have emotional benefits.

So, the question arises: is there power in prayer? If the power is in the act itself, then it's on par with manifesting.

The act, and thoughts of manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer. Much like The Secret or The Power of Positive Thinking, manifesting the latest new age trend where your mind achieves your aspirations: you can simply manifest that new job, relationship, or Ferrari. But the practice has its limitations, and its critics. Vox's senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings reports that 'Overestimating the power of one’s thoughts, which is a symptom of OCD among many other disorders, 'could be very dangerous to people who already have anxiety disorders, but potentially, it might even be enough to start those symptoms happening in someone who originally doesn’t', according to cognitive neuroscientist Rhiannon Jones.

I recently spoke to a couple of women in their early 20s who'd just returned from a manifesting conference. Manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer, even though this hugely popular practice could be understood as a secular form of piety, potentially rivalling that of the devout. But what if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer? Martin hints that the prayer itself is not the power. He sings 'Only by his grace', and 'for someone to come and show me the way.'

Simply searching on Spotify with the keyword 'pray' is only the tip of the iceberg for prayerful songs. Many of them don't include the word, yet still meditate on prayer. For instance, U2 sang 'I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry' - a reworking of King David's Psalm 40 where he is lifted out of the miry pit. The psalm's final verse begins 'But as for me, I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me.' This is not so much a song of spiritual practice, but desperation. It can be hard even to pray when you're stuck in a rut. And in his helplessness, David finds that there is someone who fills his mind with thoughts about him.

I've recently sat with people who've in some form of prayer thanked God, the universe, even the day itself. The blank space is there. The space is for us to fill. But what if we are not praying into the void? Because far and above any personal experience or benefit of prayer, the ordinariness of prayer is really quite extraordinary: We pray. Someone is listening.