He decided to return to it while making The White Stripes’ breakthrough fourth album Elephant. White shelved it, thinking he would keep it on the off chance he ever got to write a James Bond theme (which, ironically, he did eventually, singing “Another Way to Die” with Alicia Keys for 2008’s Quantum of Solace). I was playing it for Meg, and he was walking by, and I said, ‘Swank, check this riff out.’ And he said, ‘It’s OK.’” “There’s an employee here at Third Man named Ben Swank,” Jack White once said, “and he was with us on tour in Australia when I wrote that song at soundcheck.
Hard as it is to imagine now, the response to this fledgling track was initially muted. On that world tour, White, the group’s songwriter, came up with the riff to “Seven Nation Army” while messing about in soundcheck at Australian festival Big Day Out in January 2002. Their 2001 album White Blood Cells, their third of raw, blistering garage and blues rock, was met with a whirl of hype: one review of their summer UK tour called them the best thing to happen to music since Led Zeppelin.
The White Stripes – Jack and Meg White, a guitarist/drummer duo who pretended to be brother and sister when in fact they had been married and divorced – formed in Detroit in 1997. Not bad for a song that The White Stripes’ labels didn’t even want to put out as a single. Rolling Stone magazine named it the 36 th best song of all time in 2021 Jarvis Cocker once called it “this generation’s ‘Smoke on the Water’”. It has one of the most recognisable and heralded guitar riffs in rock history: since winning Best Rock Song at the 2004 Grammys, it has joined an exclusive club in reaching one billion streams on Spotify (only 212 songs have racked up so many). The only song that can link a football team in Belgium, Jeremy Corbyn, the NFL, darts player Michael van Gerwen and the port of Hamburg, The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” has become omnipresent in popular culture – an unstoppable terrace anthem that is now the soundtrack to some of the biggest sporting and political moments around the world. Except now, as the song goes, everyone knows about it. It started off 20 years ago as a catchy guitar riff from an alternative rock band’s new track.
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