Jack White apparently wanted to use The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army as a James Bond film theme
It goes without saying that Seven Nation Army features one of the most iconic riffs of all time. However, White Stripes frontman Jack White initially had a very different vision for the famous riff – namely, he felt it would be the perfect soundtrack to a James Bond movie.
In a new interview with Uncut, music producer Liam Watson recalls his time working with White on the White Stripes’ 2003 record, Elephant. White opted to record at Watson’s recording studio, Toe Rag, and that’s where Seven Nation Army took form. Throughout the process, White frequently expressed his espionage dreams for the track. “When we did Seven Nation Army, Jack said it would be great to get it on a Bond film,” he says.
READ MORE: Jack White never wanted to use a Stratocaster because they were “overused” and “indicative of white boy blues”
Watson also explained how the process wasn’t exactly simple. “The recording was more complicated as Jack was going through two guitar amps, with two mics on each amp going down to a single channel,” he explains. “Half the mixing was done as it was played, and it took over an hour to get all the elements right, but they didn’t mind playing it again and again.”
White has told numerous people about his gut feeling that Seven Nation Army was worthy of a Bond soundtrack. In fact, he even expressed the sentiment to Jimmy Page and U2’s The Edge back in 2009. In the middle of the It Might Get Loud documentary, White said: “For a second I left [the riff] and thought ‘oh, maybe one day if I ever have to do a James Bond theme song or some spy movie, maybe I’ll use it.”
He also explained how the riff first came to be. While the track has since become recognisable across the globe, it had pretty mundane beginnings; White simply landed on it during a soundcheck in Australia. “I started playing that riff… and I thought ‘oh, this is really cool,’” he recalled.
Sure he had landed on something great, he called over his friend and room mate, Ben Swank, to show him – before Swank quickly humbled White. “I said ‘what do you think of this?’ and he said ‘…it’s alright,’” White said. “It’s great when people say that, because it makes you get defensive in your brain – you think, ‘no, there’s something to this, you just don’t see it yet!’”
White took some time to cook up the final track, sitting on the riff for some time. Eventually, he penned lyrics for the song, opting to use the killer riff to take aim at people gossipping about his relationship with drummer and ex-wife Meg White.
In a 2024 countdown of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, Rolling Stone ranked the legendary hard rock track at number 36. In the short bio of the track, White explained that the name of the track was a nod to his childhood; “I didn’t have lyrics for it until later on [after the soundcheck], and I was just calling it ‘Seven Nation Army’… that’s what I called the Salvation Army when I was a kid”.
Jack White’s latest record, Frozen Charlotte, is out now.
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