Some years ago, one of Jack White’s fellow Detroit musicians introduced him to Patrick Keeler, drummer with the Cincinnati band the Greenhornes. “This is Jack,” said the friend. “He’s gonna be huge!” As White and Keeler recall the incident, they leave just enough time for the unflattering corollary of that introduction to sink in: Jack’s gonna be huge, Patrick isn’t.

“I just said, ‘Yeah, well, thanks’,” says Keeler, as he and White collapse with laughter. An insensitive introduction, perhaps, but so far accurate: White has indeed become a huge star, as one half of the White Stripes, and the Greenhornes remain a respected but not particularly well-known garage-rock band.

That is all about to change, though. The reason we are talking, and the reason Keeler can afford to laugh as loudly as White, is that they are now bandmates. Along with another of White’s Detroit musician buddies, the power- popper Brendan Benson, and Keeler’s Greenhornes colleague “Little” Jack Lawrence, they comprise the Raconteurs.

Although the Raconteurs are a new band, the four have worked together on various projects for a while now. Both Benson and White have produced records for the Greenhornes, and White has long considered Keeler and Lawrence as his rhythm section of choice. In 2002, when the guitar legend Jeff Beck asked White to put together a band to “be” the Yardbirds, as part of a career- retrospective show he was playing at the Festival Hall, White called Keeler and Lawrence to see if they would help him emulate the 1960s band that was home to a trio of guitar greats. “Jack said to me, ‘Do you want to be in a Yardbirds tribute band?’” recalls Lawrence. “And I said, ‘No, if it’s Eric Clapton’s Yardbirds. Yes, if it’s Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page.’”

“Ouch,” says Benson, feigning horror at this attack on Clapton. “Oh, man,” says White, shaking his head. Lawrence doesn’t say much, but what he does say is waspish, witty and guaranteed to have his bandmates in hysterics. The Raconteurs have the kind of natural chemistry you naively assume all bands will possess. Many don’t.

White and Benson have been a very public mutual-admiration society for a long time, raving about one another’s music, but when they started talking about their desire to work together, it wasn’t immediately obvious that the collaboration would be successful. White’s raw, passionate blues-rock seemed at another end of the spectrum from Benson’s lovingly crafted, Beatlesque pop. Would there be any middle ground?

“To be honest, we just stumbled into it,” says White. “I came by Brendan’s house one day, and he said, ‘I’ve got this song, which doesn’t have lyrics.’ I wrote some. And that was Steady as She Goes. The other guys were in town the next week, and we said, ‘Oh, let’s get them on it.’ We wrote another song, and that was Broken Boy Soldier. Pretty soon, we thought, ‘Hey, we’ve been talking about a band for years. Let’s just do it.’”

“We were really stoked about the music we’d done, but we weren’t sure if it was an album,” says Benson. “Then other people liked it so much, we thought maybe we should go ahead.” The Raconteurs’ debut album, Broken Boy Soldiers, reveals a band who are masters of myriad 1960s and 1970s rock styles, from the gentle acoustic pop of Yellow Sun to the Zeppelin stomp of the almost-title track, Broken Boy Soldier. Traffic meet the Small Faces on the psychedelic Intimate Secretary, while Blue Veins could almost be Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.

Steady as She Goes, the band’s first proper single, released tomorrow, could easily be a track from a Brendan Benson album — it comes as something of a shock to realise that it is White, not Benson, providing the sweet pop voice. But Benson and White have clearly taken great delight in effectively playing each other on the album, thus confounding their fans’ expectations. Benson plays much of the slide guitar on the album, while White plays — die-hard Stripes fans should probably look away now — a lot of the synthesizer parts. The role- swapping adds a frisson to Level, where a tight, distorted guitar solo is followed by the kind of pitch-shifted part that Brian May trademarked in Queen. Who played which, I ask? “It’s a little complicated,” says Benson. “That’s actually a solo that I wrote for Jack to play.”

As well as enjoying the role- play, the band also enjoy doing things the hard way. These days, you can just flick a switch to create a second guitar in harmony with a solo, but White and Benson insist on playing both parts. Not only did the band record the tracks on the album live, they express disbelief that anyone could ever want to do anything else. Fixing things on a computer screen — where’s the fun in that?

Perhaps I’ve been using words like “enjoy” and “fun” too loosely here. Although more than one commentator has described the Raconteurs as White’s “holiday” from the White Stripes, he is not convinced by that idea. “This didn’t feel like a holiday,” he says, taking a deep breath before explaining: “For me, music is not ‘fun’. I care about it too much.”

Okay, but perhaps a holiday in the “change is as good as a rest” sense? “Each song was going in a different direction, and that was exciting,” he agrees. “This band will show people that there are a few misconceptions about me. The restrictions, the minimalism that we purposely placed on ourselves in the White Stripes, it does come across to people like I’m a control freak, or obsessive-compulsive or whatever. But that’s not how I am the rest of the time. I’m not spending hours folding my sheets perfectly. If I was really a control freak, I’d make solo records, and I’ve never done a solo record.” After a short pause, he adds: “Sometimes I wonder why not.”

One reason is that he is going to be busy with the Raconteurs for the foreseeable future. They’re gonna be huge.

Broken Boy Soldiers is released on XL on May 15

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