"Kicking-out time, January 2004, and Laura and I are sitting on the kerb waiting for a bus outside Alexandra Palace in north London. Not that we're in a hurry to be anywhere else. We're having the best time on our kerb, cheeks flushed from hard liquor and the exhilaration of the White Stripes show we've just seen. We're busy communing with a fellow nocturnal creature, a woodlouse. It is one of those rare moments in my 20s when just about everything feels right."
"Jack and Meg White were over from Detroit promoting their fourth album, Elephant. The support band, Blanche, came from Detroit, too, and their Motor City-greased gothic country enchanted us with its banjo, lap steel, gallows humour and irresistible showbiz mystique. Then came the mighty drama and conventions peculiar to the Stripes virtuosity versus naivete, sonic sweetness versus wigging the fuck out that held us in childlike wonder."
Two young colleagues develop a deep friendship after a White Stripes concert in January 2004, sitting on the kerb outside Alexandra Palace, flushed and exhilarated while communing with a woodlouse. The office bond grew from mutual shyness and diligent outsider status, with conspiratorial canteen lunches, shared laughter, and small acts of rebellion such as leaving a profane sign on the chess-club shelf. The concert, enhanced by support act Blanche's Motor City–greased gothic country, crystallizes their daring through contrasts of virtuosity and naivete and offers release from pressures to establish careers, buy property, and start families.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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