Eight years ago in August, my entire day’s assignment as a young music journalist was to find a ticket to a White Stripes concert at Tufnell Park pub The Boston Arms. It was to be the night the unknown blues-rock duo became the hottest band in the world.

Hailed by John Peel as the best thing he’d heard since Hendrix, they exploded here in a perfect storm of hype from all sides. Except mine. I couldn’t get in.

So I was eagerly tuned for echoes of that historic evening when Jack White chose the same plain room to introduce his latest project to a small UK audience.

Now so successful that he owns his own record label and recording studio in Nashville, he has the power to make whatever music he likes with whomever he likes. The lucky ones to receive his newest blessing are Dean Fertita from Queens Of The Stone Age, Alison Mosshart of The Kills and Jack Lawrence of White’s other extra-curricular band, The Raconteurs. An album, recorded in just three weeks, is due on 13 July.

White plays the drums for the first time since he was a 19-year-old in Goober And The Peas. While he was undeniably better than his White Stripes partner Meg White, playing with brutal force and leading from the rear, seeing this genius guitarist bash cymbals was still like watching Cristiano Ronaldo be a linesman.

Mosshart was the alternative focal point and thoroughly watchable as she prowled in leopard-print, clawing at her microphone and spitting her lines from somewhere underneath her hair. An archetypal rock rebel, she smoked on stage and nuzzled White adoringly the only time he came to the front, to offer a characteristically stuttering guitar solo during the murky blues of Will There Be Enough Water. Blues was the familiar bedrock but this was the loudest a White band has ever been, each song ravaged by distortion, thrashing about in sheer volume.
Bob Dylan’s New Pony gained a new howling riff.

Originals 60 Feet Tall and Bone House were squalling, dirty rockers. The band didn’t speak to the crowd and often turned inwards, playing to White’s kit, suggesting a jam session that has got out of hand. White is clearly aiming for more limited appeal and has succeeded again.

The Dead Weather play the Forum in Kentish Town tonight: 0844 847 2405 or kentishtownforum.com.