Jack White was a happy upholsterer. He began aged 15, apprenticed to Brian Muldoon, a family friend in his home town of Detroit; later he and Muldoon would record songs under the name Two Part Resin. Aged 18 he dropped out of college after one term, forswearing a film course in favour of perfecting his craftsman’s skills. Soon he was working for a big store, Beaupre Studios, in the city’s sprawling suburbs. By the time he was 21, White had his own business: Third Man Upholstery. The company slogan: Your Furniture’s Not Dead.

As a result of his skills, White also knows a thing or two about taxidermy. He has quite a collection of stuffed animals: two gazelles, an eland, a kudu, a white elk, the head of a zebra. Those are his lions on the cover of Consolers of the Lonely, the second album by his other band (the band that’s not the White Stripes, who are currently taking time off after the release of last year’s sixth album, Icky Thump), the crackingly rumbustious four-piece known as the Raconteurs.

The photograph was taken in an obscure format, tintype, which White says was popular in “a ten-year period in the 1800s”. On the sleeve the Raconteurs are dressed like extras from Deadwood, old stagers from America’s 19th century. A tumultuous time, but also a simpler time. This guy who credits himself on album sleeves with the archaic “Jack White III”, he likes that kind of stuff.

Just as he’s no ordinary guitar hero, White was no ordinary re-coverer of couches. His shop was decked out in only three colours – yellow, white and black – and so were all his tools. He had a yellow van. On trips to collect furniture, he would dress solely in yellow and black. “It was pretty cool,” is how he remembers it. “I got so much into the cartooniness of the business, almost to the point of it being a joke to the people who would see me, and they wouldn’t really trust me to do a good job.

“I started trying to make an art form out of giving someone a bill, like writing it with crayon on a piece of paper, or having a yellow piece of paper with black marker saying, ‘You owe me $300.’ People would be like, ‘What the hell is this?’ and I’d be like, ‘I don’t know, I just want you to sign this and give it back to me and pay me, and that way I can have it as a… um…’ People just didn’t dig it. It was two different worlds colliding.”

As with his upholstery business, the White Stripes’ blues came clad only in red, white and black. Sometimes they tried to make a virtue of “cartooniness” too. Here was a terrific racket played by only two people, Jack on guitar and Meg White on drums. They pretended to be brother and sister but really they were married – then divorced. White had taken Meg’s second name: his real name is John Anthony Gillis. They would use only old-fashioned recording equipment – and recorded their breakthrough album, 2003’s Elephant, in a tiny place called Toe Rag Studios, located in a benighted corner of Hackney in London. It was a long way from Detroit and the blues mother lode. But Jack White was intrigued by Toe Rag owner Liam Watson’s bespoke collection of vintage recording equipment.

“Jack understands what this studio is about,” Watson told me in 2003. “He said to me, ‘There’s nothing like this in Detroit.’” It took the White Stripes only ten days to make the landmark album that includes the modern classic, Seven Nation Army.

Later, as the White Stripes became one of the biggest rock bands in the world, White’s playfulness-slash-fundamentalism went further as he played around with words and imagery. Last year’s Icky Thump took its title from a bastardisation of a colloquialism uttered by White’s wife of three years, Oldham-born supermodel Karen Elson, 29 (they met when she appeared in the video for the White Stripes’ single, Blue Orchid). It featured a Scottish-themed central diptych that deployed – jings! – bagpipes. Meanwhile, on the sleeve, Jack and Meg were dressed as a Pearly King and Queen. Beat that, the Strokes.

Another time, another band, another city… While Meg White lives in Los Angeles now, Jack White calls Nashville home. So do all his compadres in the Raconteurs. Old Detroit buddy Brendan Benson (guitars, vocals), after stints pursuing a solo career in California, has followed him Down South. Jack “Little Jack” Lawrence (bass) and Patrick Keeler (drums) have relocated from Cincinnati, base of their “day job” band, garage-rockers the Greenhornes.

But for the restless White, old habits die hard. His hands are never idle for long. The Raconteurs’ second album, Consolers of the Lonely, was released in March, a scant nine months after Icky Thump. It appeared almost literally out of nowhere, the band having insisted it be out as quickly as vinyl and CD pressing plants could manufacture it. So, 25 days after the Raconteurs finished the record, it was in the shops. They wanted none of the usual pre-release marketing hoo-ha.

I suggest to White that while there is an artifice about the White Stripes, the Raconteurs are a more raw experience. He replies with a sharp nod. “In the White Stripes we’re hitting ten different angles at once – blues and childishness and the aesthetic centring round the colours. A lot of it coming out of my upholstery-shop days. But this band has a totally different aspect, coming from different grounds.”

Considering the restrictions within the White Stripes, does he feel liberated in the Raconteurs? “I already have a band where I constrict myself to the hilt and break it down to the bare bones,” he says. “No real point in doing that again with a four-piece band. I wouldn’t impose that on these guys – it’s not my job to do that. The Raconteurs is a collaborative effort. I’m just 25 per cent of the band.

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