Earning their sad-song spurs

Detroit band, Blanche, are looking forward to visiting Ireland. They reckon we'll get their 'morose country tunes', writes Paul McNamee.

Like all bands from Detroit, Blanche have got a key Jack White link. But while other acts rely on White to serve as a Renaissance patron, to throw out a few well-meaning niceties in interviews and offer musical support now and again, Blanche's ties go much deeper. They used to count him as a member of their band.

When he was still jobbing John Gillis, a local musician not yet in control of his own destiny, White was drummer for Goober And The Peas - the band that eventually grew into Blanche. "He was the last of 15 drummers in Goober and the Peas," says Blanche frontman Dan "Goober" Miller. "The White Stripes hadn't started then, but you could tell he was working on the ideas. Once he started it was a clearly focused idea right from the beginning - about what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go with the music."

Blanche are an anomaly - in a city where everyone wants to be The Stooges they are a country band.

As Goober And The Peas they'd take to the stage in stetsons and Nudie suits and crunch through odd country-styled comic-punk tunes. They mutated into country garage act Two Star Tabernacle - still with White in situ - but they released one single.

By the time Blanche emerged three years ago - Miller, his wife Tracee, Brian Feeny on pedal steel, the fantastically named Patch Boyle on banjo and Lisa Jannon on drums - the overtly comic elements had fallen away. They'd been through the mill, earned their spurs and could sing those old sad songs and murder ballads for real.

"With Blanche, a lot of sad things, bad personal things happened," explains Miller. "It took about two years from the time we started recording the album to finish. You change with life experience. My brother died. He was the bass player in Goober And The Peas. He went through 10 years of mental illness and schizophrenia before he died. And Tracee's dad died a couple of months before that. Then my grandmother died within a couple of months of my brother. So three big funerals in one year tend to make the songs. it affects them a little different."

The album, If We Can't Trust the Doctors, is by turns sad and unsettling but never short of captivating. There are Carter family echoes wrestling with the swaggering, wailsome redemptive country of The Gun Club and the Bad Seeds. If any comic shadow remains from earlier incarnations it has mutated now and is mined from the dark and vicious seam the Handsome Family work so well.

"We wanted the album to have depth to it," says Miller simply.

Miller also says he can't wait to bring it all to Ireland. His respect for the old country borders on the obsessive. "Everyone in the band has some Irish," he says. "I'm half-Irish. My grand-parents are from Co Sligo. Feeny is Irish, our banjo player is another Irish man, Tracee has some Irish and Scotch in her, and our drummer - I don't know what she is but she's addicted to Guinness. And I think the Irish will get it, those morose country tunes - I don't think a lot of people understand how many of these old folk songs that we love come from Scotland and Ireland. We're looking at getting there."

Of course Jack White shows up on the record, playing guitar on recently released single Who's To Say. "That song used to be a much more driving rock and roll song," says Miller. "And talking to Jack about it, he really pushed me try to get to the feeling of what that song is about and get to the desperate sadness that is in the lyric." Miller is not shy in acknowledging what a debt is owed to White.

"He's inspired all of us," he says. "Everyone in Detroit is thankful for that. He's pushed everyone to become better musicians and to work harder lyrically on things." If anything, he is too respectful. Other Detroit names show up on the album - it's co-produced by Brendan Benson and His Name Is Alive's innovative desk-man Warn Defever - but you get the feeling that Blanche would have reached their destination eventually with or without all these guiding hands.

Blanche are a bunch of misfits and oddballs. Dan and Tracee met at a Christmas party a decade ago when they were attracted by each other's weirdness. "There seemed like there was something wrong with her and she said the same about me," he says. Miller's band play music that is obtusely out of time and outside of fashion.

Tracee Miller has said in the past, "We'd like to haunt people". With such honest, clear and weird purpose, they were never going to fail.

Blanche play Whelans on April 25th. Tickets cost €12 from usual outlets