Alongside a wonderful version of Amy Winehouse's You Know I'm No Good by rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson, the latest batch of releases from Jack White's Third Man record label contains a minor mystery. Released in shops today on the usual extremely limited seven-inch is a record by The Black Belles, a group about whom little is known except that they were assembled by White, feature Nashville burlesque model Erin Belle and have a fondness for slightly medieval-looking wide-brimmed hats. As well as recruiting the Belles, Jack produced and wrote one of the songs on the record (the other is a cover of The Knickerbockers' great 1960s Merseybeat homage, Lies) and directed the accompanying video.
What is clear, however, is that The Black Belles mark another stage in Jack White's strange career. After being an upholsterer, actor and mogul (Third Man is the umbrella name for an organisation that includes a record company, pressing plant, photo studio and design agency in a building in downtown Nashville) it appears that White is now trying on the role of svengali for size.
Both White and the Belles themselves would do well to take a lesson from rock history, the pages of which are littered with stories of what happens when the manager-producer gets a little too hands-on. Most of them don't end all that happily.
We all know what happened to Phil Spector, for example, while Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, derailed his charge's career in the 1960s by forcing him to appear in endless B-movies: while The Beatles and The Stones were busy changing the world, The King was co-starring with a man in a Great Dane suit. Or take Lou Pearlman, the mastermind behind the careers of NSYNC and The Backstreet Boys, currently serving a 25-year sentence for his role in a Ponzi scheme defrauding investors of more than $300m, and also at the centre of allegations of sexual misconduct towards his clean-cut boyband wards.
An unhealthy interest in your artists's development seems to be pretty par for the svengali course: alongside the story about Malcolm McLaren offering his managerial services to the fledgling Bananarama with a song he'd written called Don't Touch Me Down There, Daddy, is Kim Fowley.
A chance meeting with the teenage Joan Jett backstage at an Alice Cooper gig in 1975 led to Fowley helping her put together her band The Runaways, co-writing their songs Cherry Bomb and School Days, marketing them as "jailbait rock" and allegedly preparing them for hostile audiences by throwing pots of peanut butter at them while they rehearsed.
Jack White might find it hard to get away with such behaviour, though, even if he wanted to: one of the other recent signings to his label, Mildred And The Mice feature a heavily disguised Karen Elson on vocals.
