Jack White marries musician Olivia Jean in on-stage surprise
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Star proposes in Detroit while singing lyric ‘let’s get married’, before ceremony performed by label co-founder
Jack White surprised fans by marrying the musician Olivia Jean on stage during his Detroit homecoming show on Friday.
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The Detroit-born singer, songwriter and producer invited Jean onstage to join his performance and introduced her as his girlfriend.
White, 46, asked her to marry him during a rendition of song Hotel Yorba and right before the lyric “Let’s get married”.
Jean, 32, a fellow Detroit native, teared up and said yes, the Detroit Free Press reported. White then carried her offstage.
The two re-emerged for an encore and married in an onstage ceremony officiated by Ben Swank, a co-founder of White’s record label.
Jean is part of the label’s garage goth rock band Black Belles, which is on hiatus, and is also signed by the label as a solo artist.
White, who founded the White Stripes, has been married twice. His Friday show was his first solo show in his home town since 2018, and kicked off his Supply Chain Issues Tour and release of his new album Fear of the Dawn.
Jack White formed The White Stripes in 1997 with his wife, drummer Meg White. The couple had been married since ’96 and became a powerful force in the Detroit garage rock revival of the late 1990s. Although the couple divorced in 2000, they maintained a genial working relationship for a further 11 years at Meg’s insistence.
The White Stripes became world famous in the early 2000s thanks to a sound defined by the rough and ready minimalism, consisting of Jack’s guitar riffs and Meg’s simplistic yet uniquely engaging beats. The 2001 album White Blood Cells and its 2003 follow-up, Elephant, remain the band’s best-known and feature big hits like ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’, ‘We’re Going to Be Friends’, ‘Seven Nation Army’ and ‘The Hardest Button to Button’.
In 2003, at the height of The White Stripes’ success, White hit the front pages after it was reported he had kindled a romance with Bridget Jones actor Renée Zellweger, whom he met while filming Cold Mountain. This relationship would only last until December 2004, but soon after, White met the British model and singer Karen Elson.
The model, famed for shaving off her eyebrows for a front-page feature in Vogue, met Jack White after being cast in the music video for the White Stripes song, ‘Blue Orchid’. The track was released in April 2005 as the lead single from the band’s fifth studio album, Get Behind Me Satan. In its beautifully gothic music video, Elson can be seen eating an apple that bleeds a black fluid over her face.
Despite meeting for the first time on the music video set, Jack and Elson got married just a couple of months later in Manaus, Brazil, during the White Stripes’ tour of South America. Intriguingly, Meg stood in as Elson’s maid of honour while the band’s manager, Ian Montone, took on duties as Jack’s best man.
The couple had two children together before announcing a divorce on mutual grounds in 2011, the year of the White Stripes’ dissolution. After throwing a “positive swing bang humdinger” party to commemorate the breakup, as White told Rolling Stone at the time, the amicable split became more heated with restraining orders and custody disputes.
Nearly ten years later, White proposed and married singer and songwriter Olivia Jean on the same night during a performance at the Detroit Masonic Temple in April 2022.
