“‘I can only cope with it when it’s bitterly, bitterly cold,’ says Alison Mosshart in an interview with the Evening Standard. Jamie Hince laughs at her…‘The sun,’ says Mosshart sententiously, dragging on a cigarette, ‘gives you cancer.’”
The female member of the two-person, indie-rock band The Kills often drops sarcastic, light-hearted lines like this in interviews. Mosshart, 40, who hails from Vero Beach, Florida, is simultaneously sociable and a badass in a way that is completely genuine despite its seeming impossibility.
This started at an early age. When she was 13, Mosshart and fellow skater friends started in an indie-punk band called Discount. At this point she just sang, and didn’t start playing guitar until years later once in The Kills. She started touring Europe at 14. The band was crashing in London in 1999 when Mosshart heard someone playing guitar upstairs. That person was Jamie Hince. “’It was my dream guitar,’” she says, “‘really weird-sounding, broken and strange.’”
“I was done with the band I was in and I wanted to do something different,” she tells Interview magazine. “I told him I wanted to start writing myself, and he lent me a four-track to take on the road for the rest of my tour.” She’d then bring the tapes back to have Jamie listen.
The band The Kills were officially formed in 2000, and in those early days Mosshart went by the stage name “VV” and Hince was known as “Hotel.” On the heel of Mosshart’s left hand there is tattoo that reads “14-2-02,” marking the date of the time she and Jamie first took the stage together.
Mosshart became a part of The Dead Weather by accident. While on the Memphis stop of his 2009 tour with The Raconteurs, Jack White came down with a bad case of bronchitis, and was instructed by his doctor to rest his vocal chords. He subsequently asked Mosshart to assist him by singing some sets on the tour. She never left. “’The Kills were supporting the Raconteurs when our tour bus got stolen,’” Mosshart explains in a Guardian interview. “’In the meantime we had to share the Raconteurs’ bus. So we got to know each other.’”
Like one of Mary Shelley’s monsters, The Dead Weather is comprised of four seasoned artists; a whole which seems to have come together through high voltage and a clap of thunder. The chemistry of Jack White (drums), Alison Mosshart (vocals), Dean Fertita (guitar), and Jack Lawrence (bass) produces an undeniably powerful sound of rock with blues and funk undertones. Formed in 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee, the seething Dead Weather has been dubbed an alternative rock force. Now if only they had more time to meet.
Each member of The Dead Weather is currently in at least one other music group. For this reason, the band is always busy, and only writes and records music is when each member happens to be in Nashville for one or two days at a time. Like the rare shining alignment of orbiting planets, Mosshart and the other three artists have overlapped just enough over the course of two years to complete their 2015 album, Dodge and Burn. The insanity of the band’s schedule only works because of their inhumanly-fast ability to write and record songs. Mosshart recalls writing and recording four of the band’s first ever tracks in one day, and claims that their recent album took a collective total of only about three and a half weeks to make.
The group’s initial jam session just accidentally worked.
In a 2015 DIY interview with Emma Swann, Mosshart boldly states that the band “‘wouldn’t work if you replaced one of the four of us with anybody else. There’s something difficult to explain about whatever energy it is that makes this work so well. All of us have worked with tons of people before, but you don’t always get that sort of wild, unhinged creativity and the freedom to just express and play, and there’s just no fear.’”
That acceptance has lead to lengthy friendships and collaborations. “Whatever crazy idea comes into [Jamie and my] heads, that’s like gold,” Mosshart says in a 2017 interview with NME. “I don’t know that many people that would put up with me for that long and I don’t think he knows many people that would put up with him for that long.”
For Mosshart, the songwriting process is simple. Perched in Jack White’s Third Man studio, each member of The Dead Weather sits with their respective instrument; Mosshart with a microphone, paper, and pen. “They start to play music and then I feel a certain mood, almost a character,” Mosshart says in a 2015 interview with Nylon, “That directs the story in my head.” Their process? Waiting for one of their riffs to spark interest in the rest of the group. Whole songs have been completed in less than 45 minutes.
Mosshart admits that she and Jamie are always writing, even when apart. Her bandmates praise her clever lyrics. To them, she is a treasure. A zealous combination of strengths, each song Mosshart takes part in strikes like a lightning bolt, and the electricity stays with you as a buzzing aftershock.
Like many, I have never seen The Dead Weather play live. Only online videos and occasional talk shows account for their otherwise spectral joint presence. But in those videos, they are unstoppable, snarling presence. Mosshart’s howling is accompanied by the rich, lurching buzz of Fertita and Lawrence’s rare Gretsch White Falcons. White’s drums add to the ambush. Mosshart’s hair repeatedly flies and settles in front of her face.
Across all press interactions and live performances, Mosshart is known as the most social, perky, positive, and vocal of whatever musical group she is interviewing with, while still retaining a cool, rock and roll persona. “Performing is one thing, and day-to-day stuff—like the way you talk to people—is totally different,” she tells Interview. “If I acted like I did onstage in normal life, everyone would probably hate me.” More than one journalist has walked into her hotel room to be engulfed in cigarette smoke, and Mosshart is known to nonchalantly light up on stage.
The band members from both The Kills and The Dead Weather each bring their own iteration of pale skin and dark hair (and clothing) to the mix; their own rendition of black and white.
Mosshart has been spotted wearing out favorite pieces of clothing, and has appeared on stage in the same leopard blouse hundreds of times over. She wears this over thin t-shirts with skinny pants. The reason? “I get hot and sweaty when I’m jumping around,” she says in a 2009 piece with Interview Magazine. “When I’m done playing I look like I’ve just jumped in a pool. It’s really sexy.”
Mosshart’s corporeal presence adds to her force. She stands at 5’9”, which is not short for your average American woman, and added height from heeled boots gives her a lanky, stomping persona.
These days, she sports dark roots with a bleached messy mane, which, at one point, was dyed pink. Mosshart is also an exception to her male counterparts in that she doesn’t fear pattern, and often wears black shirts strewn with stars, slick, coated jeans, and fuzzy, animal-print coats. Her immaculate winged eyeliner, and the inner rosy glow of her creamy skin set her apart from her pallid pals.
“I loved the way the bands I grew up admiring looked and the way they dressed. That was just as inspiring as the other elements. It’s the whole thing: the music, their lives, their style”
She credits The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and The Rolling Stones as a few of many musical fashion influences.
The closest I’ve been to Mosshart was a Kills concert I attended at the Fox Theater in Oakland, California. The stage and surrounding facade were ornately carved, and made it seem as if I was dropped into a Moorish palace. As a duo, Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart were perhaps the most electric live performance I’ve witnessed to this day. Mosshart, a born performer, dominated the stage, flailing her body and snarling along to the grating guitar. She stood on top of amps, sometimes bringing along her guitar with its thick, spiral cord trailing behind her. This electricity is a constant across every group Mosshart is in, and she always makes a point of placing her voice on top of a charged current.
“‘A great show is one I don’t remember at all,’” says Mosshart to Nylon, “‘I walk off and I know I went somewhere.’” Even though she feels she could have taken other paths in life, such as being a visual artist, Mosshart admits that, “there’s this side of me that truly loves and is obsessed with and addicted to performing. It’s hard for me, because when I don’t play for a while, I crave it.” Her pre-performance ritual? “Usually it involves a drink. Maybe vodka with some juice in it.”
Even her bands’ early days, Mosshart’s personality was crystalized. In a 2009 interview for The Guardian Will Hodgkinson notes that, “Mosshart is far more sunny and talkative than her onstage image as the love child of Patti Smith and Johnny Thunders suggests.” She was also the “best man” at Jamie Hince and Kate Moss’ wedding, and “made a profanity-heavy, heartfelt speech.”
Despite her success, Mosshart remains humble and connected to her surroundings. “I lived in the shittiest places in the entire world,” she says “And ate toast and carrots.” After the unfortunate election of the Trump administration, she states, “At this point, it’s more of a mode of survival to find your dear things in life and hold onto them, or create them and give them to people, because we need it so badly right now… You have to, you can’t just go onto the most negative and dark places and stop working.”
As for her current projects, “There’s never really been any rules,” Mosshart tells NME, “Therefore, [The Kills] can exist forever if we want it to.”
Georgie Galinson 