(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Sat 10 January 2026 0:00, UK
Ever since it first hit the airwaves back in 1967, in a psychedelic haze of tangerine skies and Victorian-era Army generals, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has been placed on an unconquerable pedestal, worshipped by artists across the musical spectrum. For Jack White, though, there has never been any temptation to try and recreate it.
Within the realm of rock and roll music, of which White has been a fixture for multiple decades at this point, there is scarcely a songwriter out there who does not owe a core part of themselves to the pioneering sounds of The Beatles. They were, after all, the band that changed it all, and Sgt Pepper’s arguably presents them at their most wildly experimental, blazing a trail that countless future artists would attempt to follow.
Ultimately, though, trying to capture the same otherworldly feeling as that 1967 album is a virtual impossibility. Not only because there will never be another band as big as The Beatles, but also because Sgt Pepper’s has amassed a kind of untouchable reputation over the past five or six decades, heralded among the most inventive, revolutionary records to ever reach the musical mainstream.
Throughout his own illustrious career in music, Jack White has never made any attempt to hide the unwavering intensity of his adoration for The Beatles, famously claiming that he can identify any of the band’s songs within only a second of hearing them. Still, that love for the group has never really translated into a desire to imitate their output.
On the contrary, when White came to work on The Raconteurs’ debut album, Broken Boy Soldiers, back in 2006, he seemed to make a conscious effort to invert the production and songwriting style of Sgt Pepper’s. “The sessions for the record were really fast,” he told The Aquarian at the time. “We did all ten songs in just a few days. We really didn’t realise we were a band until halfway through the recording process. To us, we all just had some time off.”
“The next thing we knew, we were turning into a band and making a record,” White continued. “So, instead of taking additional time and trying to make Sgt Pepper’s, we decided to just try and get a snapshot of what the band was when we first got together.”
Seemingly, White wanted to capture a sense of spontaneity and a back-to-basics atmosphere, worlds apart from the extensive production and exhaustive studio sessions that The Beatles’ album required all those years ago. Of course, the two albums are wildly different anyway, in a vast multitude of ways, but Broken Boy Soldiers remains a strong argument for simplicity in rock.
With the album, White expertly demonstrated the fact that expansive production techniques and a litany of overdubs and experimentation aren’t always essential in creating a great rock and roll record, subverting the expectation that The Beatles had set out back in the 1960s, and everybody else had attempted to follow since.
In the end, though, the two albums did share at least one thing in common, with White declaring, “But if you were to ask me what I thought the record sounds like, I don’t really know. I haven’t gotten my head around it yet.”
Related Topics
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.