Before I have time to decide whether they’re worthy of the hyperbole, or merely a great bandname in search of an idea (see Gay Dad), singer Martin Tomlinson spots me at the back and charges through the crowd to yell at me, chin to chin: “Oh so educated, and oh so civilised!” Crowd confrontation, of the post-Leigh Bowery type, is SC’s game. In fact, he embraces it by singing “Jolene” without changing the lyrics. He also possesses the sweetest romantic streak, a child’s idealised view of love, as expressed on lines like “Let’s get married.. in a big cathedral by a priest!”. The perception of Meg White, meanwhile, may never recover from Matt Lucas’s portrayal (on Rock Profiles) of a simpleton squawking “I can play drums!” But she can play drums, whacking those tubs like an even more brutal John Bonham while Jack flies away into his own freestyle riff nirvana.”I love you,” Jack announces at the end, “and my sister loves you too.” He knows, as well as we do, that in rock’n'roll, a good myth always beats the truth.I arrive at Trash too late for the entrance of Selfish Cunt, the unknown band whose appearance in The Guardian’s top 40 most important bands in Britain raised eyebrows last autumn. As well as keeping things interesting for them, it also performs an important function, ensuring that going through the motions is not an option.Their appearance is as simple as the scenery. Meg is in a black top, red jeans, and – interesting primitivist detail – bare feet. Jack’s head-to-toe in black, apart from one red stripe down the side of his Gay Hussar pants.Now that the original Man in Black has departed, and with Jack’s new reputation as a street-fighting man, maybe White is ready to step into Cash’s strides, with only a few alterations necessary (“I punched a man in Detroit, just to watch him bruise…”) He’s definitely got the badass factor Masculinity, of course, always spills over into camp It’s a fact which Jack doesn’t dodge.

Wherever you’re standing in the hall, they’re utterly gripping, impossible not to watch. You cannot avert your gaze.However lo-fi and purist their recording technique may be, nothing prepares you for the sheer blind, ugly violence of The White Stripes at full throttle. It’s only in the flesh that you remember why this is America’s greatest living band, the duo who achieved the impossible: defied Einstein, halted history in its tracks, and reanimated the corpse of rhythm and blues with an electrifying jolt.No two White Stripes set lists are alike, and tonight mixes crowdpleasers like “Seven Nation Army”, “Hotel Yorba” and “Hardest Button To Button” with obscure cover versions (tonight’s selection includes “Cool Drink of Water Blues”, a song written by Tommy Johnson in 1928). But if tonight’s show is any guide, they can project across these wide open spaces with ease. From the moment Meg alights upon her personalised drumstool and Jack runs out with the simple shout “LONDON!” and rips into some old blues or other (“When I Hear My Name” from the first album, but the savagery is such that it barely matters), all eyes, like Roman roads, converge on the two of them.They perform in front of the simplest of backdrops – one white screen, two red drapes, and one spotlight which casts Jack’s shadow 20ft tall across the Doric columns and Art Deco arches of the Alexandra Palace interior – but this duo don’t need pyrotechnics and video screens. What was once an undercurrent is now overground (at one point tonight, Jack climbs up onto Meg’s bass drum and screams down at her).How all this emotional intrigue would work in the mega-sized venues they are now obliged to play on their biggest indoor tour yet was always questionable.

And regardless of their respective strings of high-profile affairs, it’s the dynamic between the two which really matters.
Naturally, this doesn’t make The White Stripes any less of a compelling experience If anything, it’s heightened. The first time I ever saw The White Stripes, at Dingwall’s in the summer of 2001, I knew something unusual was going on. I observed “something distinctly un-brotherly” about the way Jack sang songs of bitterness and recrimination straight into his “big sister” Meg’s face, and noted a “tangible sexual tension”, an “unspoken incestuous latency”.Since then, the marriage certificates have been published, the divorce papers too (not to mention birth certificates proving the pair are too close in age to have been siblings), and former friends like The Von Bondies are dropping sly bombshells about what went on “back when Jack and Meg were together”. (The Sinfonietta’s performance of Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety was similarly sublime.) Deborah Miles-Johnson’s performance of Copland’s In the Beginning – caught on radio on my way to see van Raat – was radiant and tender, and Lor?ixenberg brought the house down on Saturday night with Aria: Cage’s wittiest and most virtuosic multi-lingual vocal work, scored for amplified voice and whatever else might come in useful. Here it was a television, a vacuum cleaner, a camera, a packet of crisps and the sassiest, funniest and riskiest stage presence around.

Ecco la diva! She should have been on the telly.a.picard independent.co.uk. So, the cat is out of the bag, and rock’s worst-kept secret is a secret no more: it’s true that they loved one another. Ralph van Raat’s account of the Concerto for Prepared Piano with the London Sinfonietta on Sunday was masterful: unshowy, sensitively shaped, nuanced and alert. Ives’s Central Park in the Dark – the earliest work in the programme but, 4′33″ aside, the most radical – was the only piece to warrant the titular context of Friday’s concert, and jolly well played it was too under conductor Lawrence Foster.Impressive as pianist Philip Mead’s command of the Cowell appeared to be – who can tell? – the best solo contributions to “Cage Uncaged” were yet to come. Punching a keyboard in protective mittens might make for an unusually bracing aural experience but if atonality clings to the contours and dynamics of the late 19th-century concerto, it’s nothing more than mashed-up Rachmaninov.