SEVEN NATION ARMY

The White Stripes From: Elephant, 2003

Not for the first time in this list, we’re looking at an irrefutable winner that, at its heart, is so simple it’s almost laughable. A total novice could play it on guitar and many have done, just as they’ve played Smoke On The Water, You Really Got Me, Day Tripper…

Four albums into The White Stripes’ career, Detroit native Jack White already had considerable form as a blues revivalist with a raw approach to production. But even by his standards Seven Nation Army was stripped back. It didn’t even have a chorus as such – that nowimmortal G-major guitar line (all seven notes of it), routinely emulated, hummed and chanted the world over, was the chorus.

What it did have – and which would reoccur in latter-day White Stripes standout Icky Thump – was beefiness; the sort of bold punchiness that much of their earlier work had sidestepped in favour of a loud but more brittle, sparser sound.

“Jack White is somebody who is extraordinary in his visionary thinking,” Jimmy Page said in The

Blues magazine. “He might explain that he’s here [in modern times], but he’s actually four stops further on down the road. He thinks so far ahead you only can only marvel.”

Seven Nation Army started life in early 2002, as a riff written in a hotel in Australia. Not that it was a mere throwaway, coughed out without intention. White did have one possible purpose for it in mind. He has said: “I thought: ‘If I ever got asked to write the next James Bond theme, that would be the riff for it.’”

Still, on its own he didn’t think it was all that great, and the riff seemed likely to remain squirrelled away – a fun “experiment” that he might dig out one day. As it turned out, that day arrived sooner than he anticipated. Seven Nation Army was fleshed out (its title inspired by White’s mispronunciation of ‘Salvation Army’ as a child), and released as the first single from The White Stripes’ 2003 album Elephant.

Bizarre to think now, but at the time – White by then convinced of the song’s merit – the label

“I thought: ‘If I ever got asked to write the next James Bond theme,

that would be the riff for it.’”

Jack White

had wanted to go with a different track, There’s No Home For You Here, instead.

“I can think back to when Elephant came out,” White told XFM. “I wanted to put Seven Nation Army out as a single. The label in England and the label in America both didn’t want to.” Seventeen years on, their doubts about the track seem ridiculous.

There’s a good chance you can sing bits of the lyrics under your breath, but it’s the riff that has really been absorbed into public consciousness. It all started with football crowds. It’s generally accepted that Belgium’s Club Brugge fans were the first to adopt a (wordless) chant of Seven Nation Army, at their Champions League victory over AC Milan in October 2003. Since then it’s reappeared again and again at sports stadiums and festivals across the world.

“Nothing is more beautiful than when people embrace a melody and allow it to enter the pantheon of folk music,” White said of Seven Nation Army shortly after the World Cup in 2006. “As a songwriter it is something impossible to plan, especially in modern times. I love that most people who are chanting it have no idea where it came from.”