“Can you just put Jack White on the phone?” is a question I am not going to ask Dean Fertita of THE DEAD WEATHER (even though I desperately want to). In fact, I have a whole lot of questions I am not going to ask, because frankly you have to keep a tight rein on yourself when you love a band so much you’d name your first born after their drummer. But it’s hard to think of an original topic to raise with a supergroup featuring Jack White of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs, Alison Mosshart from The Kills, Jack Lawrence from The Raconteurs and Dean Fertita from Queens of the Stone Age – with collectively more than 50 years in the music industry, I can’t help but feel they’ve been there, done it all before.
In terms of the music, though, this couldn’t be further from the truth. “The exciting thing about The Dead Weather is that we felt like we we’re doing something new,” Fertita tells me, on the phone all the way from Detroit, Michigan. “I think there’s inevitable influence from everything we’ve done, but unless we were doing something we felt was new and exciting I don’t think we would have been as interested.”
The band got together somewhat spontaneously when The Kills were opening for The Raconteurs on their US tour. “I came down to see the last couple of Raconteurs shows,” Fertita explains. “After the show I was going to go stay with Jack [White] for a couple of days, and Alison ended up coming up as well, and little Jack [Lawrence] was in Nashville too, so it ended up becoming a recording session the next day. We thought it was going to be a 45 and it turned into a record, so it was a pretty good day.”
A pretty good day turned into a year-long world tour and a second record, which is due out in April. The band is still finalising the details, but Fertita divulges that the first single is likely to be Die By the Drop, and the second entitled Blue Blood Blues.
There’s so much mystery surrounding this supergroup that whenever Fertita actually tells me something I feel like he’s just flicked a coin to a beggar (yes, I am the beggar in this scenario). I ask, for example, what inspired the name ‘The Dead Weather,’ and Fertita replies, “we can’t actually remember! In the recording process names would just show up one day and leave the next, and this one kind of stuck around for a little bit. It just has a mood similar to what we’re doing and seemed to fit.”
It certainly does seem to fit, with the band’s first album, Horehound, a menacing mix of swaggering blues riffs, rock drumming and eerie organ melodies delivered through blown-out speakers. Lines like “I’ve done some bad things/and they get easier to do” delivered in Mosshart’s low, coital growl are enough to make you shiver, and White’s distinctive vocals have the spine-chilling timbre of fingernails on a blackboard.
Still, I am suspicious of this alleged ‘not remembering,’ since Fertita admits that the band intentionally cultivates an aura of mystery. “It’s such an information age – everybody wants to know every detail about everything,” he says. “I think letting people decide for themselves what the music means to them is a cool thing. I listen to a lot of ‘60s and ‘70s rock music, and during that time there was a lot of mystery surrounding the bands. I remember just looking at album covers and wanting to know things about them that I could never find out. It made you feel more curious; it made you feel driven to be closer to it.”
The mythology surrounding The Dead Weather is amplified by the media coverage that invariably follows the band. Jack White is married to flame-haired supermodel Karen Elson (whom he secretly wed in a Brazilian rainforest), and there are rumours of an ongoing feud between Alison Mosshart and Kate Moss, who is dating Mosshart’s bandmate from The Kills, Jamie Hince.
I try to dig up a bit of celebrity gossip myself, confessing my ladycrush on Alison Mosshart in what I hope will be a tit-for-tat, caring-and-sharing kind of thing. So, Dean, is there any sexual tension in The Dead Weather? He laughs for a good minute or so and then says, “no, Alison’s a sister to us,” before adding, as if to make me feel better, “but a very beautiful one. I don’t blame anybody for having a huge crush on Alison.”
Fertita will admit that there is, however, a different kind of tension in the band. “We push each other and challenge each other so much that it’s kind of a volatile mix, in a good way,” he says. “Everybody tries so hard to give something to this project that we’re really pushing ourselves the whole time, and that creates this weird tension. I think that’s what makes us exciting.”
Exciting is the word, and with less than a minute to go, there are so many more questions I want to ask – Is Jack White really a vampire? Where does Alison buy her jeans? Will you be my Facebook friend? – but even if he was willing to answer those questions, I’m not sure I’d really want him to. As Fertita said himself, “that’s the interesting part – not knowing – right?”
You’d be mad NOT to catch The Dead Weather at the ANU Bar on Thursday March 25. Tickets through Ticketek.
