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

Care

Community

Culture

Film & TV

25 March 2025

5 min read

Amandaland's portrayal of falling social standing is spot on

What happens when motherhood is no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

On the sidelines of a pitch a well-dressed mum hands a coat to a sceptical looking mum beside her.

Nobody likes mums. Not really. We talk about our kids all the time, we’re bossy, we’re interfering, we’re no fun. The stereotypes abound. Not even mums like other mums. We should help each other, but we often end up mercilessly judging each other instead. If you work, you’re a cruel, neglectful mother; if you’re a stay-at-home mum, you’re lazy, weak, and probably boring.

Even worse than being disliked, though, is not being taken seriously. I thought motherhood would bestow a certain level of respect, a kind of admission, from society at large, that if you can keep a human being alive – let alone several – you must be somewhat competent at least. I can now see that’s only the case in older motherhood, once your children are grown up and you can prove to the world that you did, in fact, do a good job of raising them. Before then, while your kids are still loud toddlers or moody teenagers, being a mother is a decidedly low-status affair.

That’s exactly what Amandaland, the new Motherland spin-off, gets right. In Motherland, the original show, the character of Amanda is a confident, terrifying alpha mum, a modern anti-heroine and a foil to the frazzled, overwhelmed protagonist Julia. As a stay-at-home mum, Amanda holds on to her high social status by a combination of displaying her husband’s wealth and a careful strategy of putting other mothers down at every possible occasion.

By the end of Motherland, however, Amanda is lost: she opens and very quickly closes a lifestyle shop, she’s about to lose her house in the divorce, and her ex-husband is about to remarry. She’s not quite so terrifying anymore; she’s more human, more fragile. Her insecurities begin to show.

It’s only in Amandaland, however, that her alpha-mum persona fully breaks down. She’s had to downsize and – gasp – move from Acton to a less affluent part of London; her ex-husband is refusing to pay for their kids’ private school or for her car; she has no career and no prospects. While materially still more privileged than many, in the eyes of society she’s lost any claim to admiration.

As she meets a host of mums and dads from her kids’ new school after her move, it’s obvious that Amanda is trying to conceal this drastic change. She refers to all the furniture which she’s hording from her old, much bigger house – in her mother’s garage – as ‘curated items from my style archive’. When her mother nudges her to get rid of said ‘curated items’ in the school’s car boot sale, she deflects by declaring, in a suitably dramatic way, ‘I’m so ready to streamline all these investment pieces’. In the next episode she starts showing off, at her kids’ football practice, that ‘this big-shot interiors firm just begged me for a meet at their flagship store’. What she means is that she’s got a job interview at a kitchen and bathroom showroom. Which job she does get, by the way, and proceeds to refer to it for the rest of the show as her ‘collab’.

I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There’s a reason Amanda speaks in cringeworthy euphemisms half of the time, and it’s not because she delights in being irritating. It’s because she’s feeling the full force of her fall in social status. We can judge her for being shallow enough to care about wealth and appearance so much. But it’s impossible for me not to feel an enormous amount of sympathy for her. I know what it’s like to see someone’s gaze at a social event drift away as you mention that you’re a stay-at-home mum. I know the agonizingly overnice look that often meets you when you say you’ve been trying to get back to work after having kids.

And to be clear, I’ve been referring to ‘mothers’ throughout, but consciously being perceived as low status is an experience common to all primary caregivers. In Motherland, Kevin, the stay-at-home dad of the group, was often mocked and dismissed as insignificant for looking after his two daughters full time. I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There are two ways to respond to the plain fact that caregiving is seen as low status and low value, and Amanda learns both over the course of the show. The first is to realise we have an innate value that cannot be determined by social approval. We must become comfortable with being sneered at; there’s no way around it. Without spoiling what happens in later episodes, Amanda does grow in virtue by valuing status less and less, eventually rejecting the opportunity to return to wealth and high status for the sake of her family and her own integrity.

The second way is to find fellowship. The friendships which Amanda forms, especially with the wonderful Anne, also an original Motherland character, are what save her from herself in the end. Anne and the other parents show her that they, at least, don’t care that she’s no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying. They chip away at her armour until she realises that she doesn’t need to be adored in order to be loved.

We cannot control how people perceive us, but we can control how we respond. At the beginning of the show, Amanda’s response to the challenges of motherhood was to sink into self-absorption. In the end, she’s redeemed by the kindness of her friends. Motherhood will, perhaps, always be a thankless, low status job. But it’s also, and will always be, an irreplaceable one.

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