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 and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

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?

Column

Culture

Justice

Trauma

17 March 2025

4 min read

Do victim statements offer up drama or justice?

Recent tragic cases highlight the changing audience for impact statements.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A classical court house with a statue on top of a dome.

The Old Bailey.

It’s a lesser-known irony of ancient history that it was Roman Emperor Tiberius who introduced Justitia to the pantheon of the gods, as the goddess of justice. Ironic in that it was Tiberius’s minion, Pontius Pilate, in remote Judea, who had history’s worst day at the office, administering Roman justice so cack-handedly on an insurgent preacher and miracle-worker from Nazareth that he sparked a chain of events on which a whole new system of (at least western) justice was founded.

Justitia was the antecedent of Lady Justice, whose statue adorns the dome of London’s central criminal court at the Old Bailey – and many other courts besides. She invariably holds the judicial symbols of weighing scales and a sword. And she is often blindfolded, though not on the Old Bailey, despite such constitutional eminences as the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick erroneously claiming she is.

The blindfold, scales and sword symbolise Lady Justice’s impartiality, the primacy of evidence and the equality of all before the law. We’ve grown accustomed to the rule of law in our democracy being applied blindly and without emotion. Convicted murderers are often described as having acted in cold blood and we expect justice to be served on them in the same manner, coldly.

It’s in that context that I want to examine one way in which Lady Justice is going a bit wrong these days. It’s not about miscarriage of justice, so much as the dispassion of it. I’m talking about the victim impact statement, introduced in the UK in 1996, which comes between conviction and sentencing.

It was meant to be an opportunity for victims and their families to tell the court of the impact and effects of the crime committed upon them. And, in that sense, to assist the judge or other sentencing authority to deliver an appropriate degree of punishment. So it is about the impact of the crime on those most directly affected by it.

That appears no longer to be solely – or even in some instances partly – the case. The victim statement now seems to be an opportunity for the irreparably damaged to sound off at the defendant, to vent their pain and anger and contempt for and at the wretched convict.

Take John Hunt, the BBC correspondent who lost his wife Carol and two of their three daughters, Hannah and Louise, to a multiple murder (and rape) one day last summer. His victim statement was less about the unimaginable effect these crimes have had on him and his surviving daughter, Amy, than about the divine judgment he would wish to call down on the murderer, Louise’s former partner Kyle Clifford.

It really served no judicial purpose. It’s impossible to conceive that anything Hunt had to say had the slightest influence over the judge’s intention to pass down whole-life terms on Clifford, which he duly did. Its sole purpose seems to have been to allow Hunt to have his day in court, as it were, and who would wish to deny him that? But that does undermine the explicit purpose of the victim statement.

Hunt himself conceded as much at the start of his statement when he said of his victim statement:

“I initially misunderstood its purpose. Do I really need to detail the impact of having three quarters of my family murdered?”

He’s right – he didn’t. But he saw it as his “final opportunity” to address his family’s murderer. There followed an excruciating and heart-rending verbal attack on the convicted prisoner, culminating with the prophecy of his despatch to hell on his “dying day”:

“The screams of Hell, Kyle, I can hear them now. The red carpet will come out for you…”

I can’t know if Hunt would prefer the death penalty to be available to despatch his family’s killer immediately. One suspects he probably does. I oppose it, one reason being that it can leave no room for penance and redemption. We must surely all agree that Hunt gets a free pass on that rationale, but with no more severe sentence available than that which was passed, again we must ask what the purpose of the victim statement was.

If it is simply to wish a hellish death on the perpetrator, then again we need to ask what purpose is being served and, indeed, if it’s healthy both for the judicial process and for the victim who delivers the statement.

The same thought arose at a pre-sentencing hearing of the recent Nottingham murderer, when the son of one of the three victims, James Coates, told the killer:

“Valdo Calocane, you claim the voices told you to kill these innocent people. Now listen to me, kill yourself.”

Is that about impact? I don’t think so. I fear it has more to do with theatre in a media age that is insatiable for drama. Part of the purpose of the law is to maintain a distance between those affected emotionally and those who have committed crimes against them.

Remove that and we reduce not only some of the justice for criminals to mere spectacle, but also in some degree respect for their victims and, indeed, the quality of mercy.

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