ONCE IT WAS BLOOD RED AND SNOW WHITE. NOW SULPHUR YELLOW AND ELECTRIC BLUE. THE LIVERY CHANGES BUT ONE THING DOESN’T: JACK WHITE DOES NOTHING BY HALVES. TOUTING NOT ONE NEW ALBUM BUT TWO, HE INVITES MOJO TO HIS XANADU TO TALK FASTING, TROLLING AND CELL PHONES, JACKO, MACCA AND THE STONES. AND THE QUESTION IS ASKED: IS THIS REALLY A BETTER, STRONGER, NICER JACK WHITE? “EVERYTHING I’M DOING RIGHT NOW IS ALL REBIRTH,” HE TELLS GR AYSON HAVER CURRIN.

Eclectic warrior: Jack White at Third Man Records, Nashville, January 21, 2022.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM OLDHAM.

WHEN JACK WHITE GOT THE CALL SAYING HE WAS NEEDED on national television, he knew it was time to start fasting again.

It was the first full week of October 2020, seven months since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. After video captured Morgan Wallen partying sans mask and making out with strangers, NBC’s Saturday Night Live – still the US’s marquee musical spotlight – scuttled the young countr y star’s scheduled appearance at the last minute. What’s more, Eddie Van Halen had died a day earlier. Saturday Night Live needed a guitar hero, and fast.

On Wednesday morning, four days before the broadcast, the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, rang White’s Nashville landline. If the network’s private jet landed there on Friday, could White play on Saturday? He didn’t hesitate.

“It’s like vaudeville – ‘Hey, some guy broke his leg. Get out onstage,’” White tells MOJO, almost jumping out of an overstuffed chair in his Nashville office. “I love scenarios where you’re forced to create. When the chips are down, something inside of me goes with this gut feeling about how to attack.”

As one of 10 children in his family’s crowded Detroit home, White religiously taped Saturday Night Live. He’d appeared on the programme three times since The White Stripes debuted there in 2002, the fresh-faced and mop-haired singer writhing across the stage in shirt-to-shoe red. In the decades since, he says, “They have become a little like family.”

White, then, wanted to try something special, hoping to harness the same energy that made him so memorable 18 years earlier. From the moment Michaels rang until curtain call, White didn’t eat at all.

“You’ve got two days to rehearse. OK, but I’m going to make it even worse – I’m also going to not eat,” he says, eyes bright above a broad smile. “I can’t help myself.”

Flanked by drummer Daru Jones and bassist Dominic Davis, the short-notice set seemed a nearatomic release. Beginning with a version of his 2016 Beyoncé collaboration Don’t Hurt Yourself, he roared into The White Stripes’ Ball And Biscuit, then a rapturous rendition of Jesus Is Coming Soon, a Blind Willie Johnson standard about the 1918 flu pandemic. He later squealed the solo of Lazaretto, the title cut from his 2014 album, from a blue Wolfgang guitar designed by Eddie Van Halen himself.

Social media lit up like fireworks, as if the ecstatic primitivism of those 10 minutes offered notice that neither White nor rock were dead.

Frankly, a revival was overdue. White’s erratic 2018 album Boarding House Reach had flopped. His long-abusive relationship with the media and fellow musicians had turned him into the butt of jokes, or, as he puts it, “easy pickings”. He wanted to start again.

“I enjoy extreme circumstances,” he says. “My brain goes, ‘I’m going to come out of this a stronger, bigger, better person.’”

“I HAD THE ENERGY FROM THE FASTING. IT WAS EXHILARATING, SO INSPIRING AND UPLIFTING.”

Tom Oldham (5), Getty

Tom Oldham (thanks to Lighting Assistant James Hole and Film Processing by Abby Johnson)

To announce this phase with a symbol of renewal, his longtime girlfriend, musician/beautician Olivia Jean, dyed his hair electric blue. “Ever ything I’m doing right now is all rebirth.”

THE TIMING OF WHITE’S TELEVISED REANIMATIONcould not have been better. For the first six months of the pandemic, he’d made no new music. He didn’t want to get excited about songs only to have them languish in lockdown or production pauses.

He’d focused instead on the upholster y hobby he assumed would be his career until The White Stripes catapulted. He designed the Texas headquarters of Warstic, the baseball bat company he co-owns. He plotted another branch of his Third Man empire, a canar y-yellow storefront near London’s Carnaby Street. “I wasn’t missing for creativity,” White says. “It was happening ever y day.”

But in September, a month before Saturday Night Live, White retreated to his other home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a mid-’50s masterpiece of glinting glass walls and straight lines designed by modernist icon George Nelson. He prowled the music stores, buying a guitar and enough digital gear to muster a makeshift studio.

At the start of 2020, White eliminated sugar from his life and shifted to a whole-foods diet. Inspired by The Fasting Cure, a 1911 book (since widely debunked) by American political firebrand Upton Sinclair, White started experimenting with fasting to tap energy reserves that, at 44, he wondered if he even had. His fasts expanded –a day, 36 hours, two days – and combined with oddly timed bursts of physical exercise. “I was riding my bike at five in the morning,” he says – smiling at the image he knows that conjures. “Your body’s telling you to go find food. Your body’s prepared for this.”