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With the head White Stripe's other band releasing their new Consolers of the Lonely this week, here's a look-back at how the Raconteurs exploded on an unsuspecting world two years ago.

THE BUSMAN'S holiday has a long if mixed history in rock. From makeshift supergroups to one-off time-killers to impromptu jam sessions, sideline moonlightings are part of the very fabric of popular music.

What makes the Raconteurs unusual is that they're a vehicle for Jack White to do something altogether more conventional than the day job that is the White Stripes. Where that Detroit duo flouted every rule in the rock manual and became the coolest group in the world anyway, the Raconteurs are a) all-male, b) four-piece, c) guitar-driven and d) hard-rockin' and ass-kickin'.

The good news is that while the Raconteurs operate within the coded confines of orthodox US guitar rock, much of their debut album Broken Boy Soldiers is fired by the same liberated, intuitive spirit that drives the White Stripes. And yes, they sound like they're having fun, if you define "fun" as being able to pretend you're the Stooges' Ron Asheton for a night.

"Whereas when we started this band," White told me, "there was no, 'This is gonna be a soul band or this is gonna be a big rock band'. Nobody said anything about anything we were gonna be, so that made it even more fun."

The Raconteurs were born of the friendship between gothic-blues-punk god White and bedsit power-pop craftsman Brendan Benson. "I stopped by Brendan's one day and he said, 'I got this song that needs some lyrics,'" says White. "I took a listen to it and it was the music for 'Steady, As She Goes'. We really loved it and just kept playing it, so we said, 'Maybe it's time to do this band we keep talking about'."

While a musical Venn diagram might not easily display the common ground between White's neo-Led-Zeppelin minimalist primitivism and Benson's Fountains of Wayne-meets-Matthew Sweet singer-songwriting, the Raconteurs enables the two men to meet halfway and produce music they'd never otherwise have attempted. Imagine a pair of overgrown kids trying on each other's clothes.

For overgrown kids read Broken Boy Soldiers. The album's (not quite) title track "Broken Boy Soldier" turns out to be a brilliant dissertation on immature indie musicians, set to a galloping garage-psych groove and boasting an inflamed White vocal that inevitably recalls the Steve Marriott of the Small Faces' "Toy Soldier."

"I guess it was about breaking out, like it's time for everybody to grow up," White says of the song. "There's kind of a feeling when all your friends are musicians and nobody has a real job, you wonder how long this is going to last and how long it's going to be before people start treating people with respect and acting more responsibly."

"Steady, As She Goes" sounds as snap-cracklingly great as it did when it was first unleashed as a 7" single in January. If Broken Boy Soldiers is Detroit's Nevermind – it isn't, but never mind – then "Steady" is the Raconteurs' irresistible "Teen Spirit." To hear inimitable White vocal lines riding on driving drums and churning guitars is a pleasure one should just surrender to. Pointing out that it isn't as radical as the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" or "Blue Orchid" – let alone "The Nurse" – would be pedantic.

Some tracks on Broken Boy Soldiers could have made it on to the next Brendan Benson album without much fuss, just as a stripped-down version of the superb "Store Bought Bones" might easily have migrated to the next Stripes opus. Other songs, however, sound like pure fusions of White and Benson. On "Intimate Secretary" and "Call It A Day," the two men come together perfectly via Beatlish harmonies that summon nothing so much as the ghosts of Revolver's "She Said, She Said" or "And Your Bird Can Sing."

In any case it would be rash to assume it's Benson who brings the whiteboy-retro melodicism to the table, or that White inserts the more twisted, blackened moments into songs such as "Hands" or "Level." "We're learning that when people think something sounds like Brendan or sounds like me," says White, "in fact it turns out it was the other way round."

While we're about it, let us acknowledge the considerable power that the Greenhornes rhythm section (bassist Jack Lawrence, drummer Patrick Keeler) bring to the Raconteurs. Those who recall the thrilling "Portland, Oregon" on Loretta Lynn's White-produced Van Lear Rose will be aware of the heat this Nashville duo generate. "The drive of the intro on 'Portland, Oregon' was these two," says White. "They were the driving force behind that track. And that drive you can also hear on 'Broken Boy Soldier', and it's such a brilliant thing for Brendan and me to build off."

It's probably a good thing that Little Jack has the last word on Broken Boy Soldiers. Prefaced by backwards Revolver guitars, "Blue Veins" sounds for all the world like the kind of thing the raw young Robert Plant was singing in his mid-'60s blue-eyed-soul days with the forgotten Listen--ironic given a stray White remark that Plant was what he least liked about Led Zeppelin. A slice of "House Of The Rising Sun"-style melodrama in 6/8 time, replete with gospelly piano and shimmering vibrato guitar, "Blue Veins" unavoidably leads us back into Stripes-world.

Which is probably what Broken Boy Soldiers will do anyway. Anyone who thinks Jack White will abandon the avant-garde Americana of his work with Meg clearly doesn't understand this most maverick and ornery of contemporary rock gods. In the meantime it's a treat to hear the guy telling his tales, playing his songs, and having all the wild fun he deserves.

Hear audio from this interview, and read more Raconteurs and White Stripes articles, at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.