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?

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.