The White Stripes song that found Jack White a new wife
Jack White formed The White Stripes in 1997 with his wife, drummer Meg White. The couple had been married since ’96 and became a powerful force in the Detroit garage rock revival of the late 1990s. Although the couple divorced in 2000, they maintained a genial working relationship for a further 11 years at Meg’s insistence.
The White Stripes became world famous in the early 2000s thanks to a sound defined by the rough and ready minimalism, consisting of Jack’s guitar riffs and Meg’s simplistic yet uniquely engaging beats. The 2001 album White Blood Cells and its 2003 follow-up, Elephant, remain the band’s best-known and feature big hits like ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’, ‘We’re Going to Be Friends’, ‘Seven Nation Army’ and ‘The Hardest Button to Button’.
In 2003, at the height of The White Stripes’ success, White hit the front pages after it was reported he had kindled a romance with Bridget Jones actor Renée Zellweger, whom he met while filming Cold Mountain. This relationship would only last until December 2004, but soon after, White met the British model and singer Karen Elson.
The model, famed for shaving off her eyebrows for a front-page feature in Vogue, met Jack White after being cast in the music video for the White Stripes song, ‘Blue Orchid’. The track was released in April 2005 as the lead single from the band’s fifth studio album, Get Behind Me Satan. In its beautifully gothic music video, Elson can be seen eating an apple that bleeds a black fluid over her face.
Despite meeting for the first time on the music video set, Jack and Elson got married just a couple of months later in Manaus, Brazil, during the White Stripes’ tour of South America. Intriguingly, Meg stood in as Elson’s maid of honour while the band’s manager, Ian Montone, took on duties as Jack’s best man.
The couple had two children together before announcing a divorce on mutual grounds in 2011, the year of the White Stripes’ dissolution. After throwing a “positive swing bang humdinger” party to commemorate the breakup, as White told Rolling Stone at the time, the amicable split became more heated with restraining orders and custody disputes.
Nearly ten years later, White proposed and married singer and songwriter Olivia Jean on the same night during a performance at the Detroit Masonic Temple in April 2022.
Watch the music video for The White Stripes’ ‘Blue Orchid’ below.
