When Jack White first brought his “other band”, the Raconteurs, to Britain two years ago, people were understandably sceptical about the long-term viability of an act whose presence on the international stage lay so deeply in the shadow of the White Stripes. But seeing the Raconteurs again this week, on a brief visit to spread the word about their second album, Consolers of the Lonely, I found myself wondering instead about the future of the White Stripes.

For although White is still very much the dominant presence in the Raconteurs, they have gelled as a unit and, on the evidence of this show, acquired the kind of genuine group spirit that could end up moving mountains. Dressed like a gang of bohemian snooker players, they started off hunched together around Patrick Keeler’s drum kit, cranking up the riff of the new album’s title track.

The guitarist Brendon Benson and the keyboard player Mark Watrous sang the opening lines in a neat, close harmony before White came charging in with his trademark manic shriek. “If you’re looking for an accomplice . . . You’re gonna find yourself alone,” he yelped as the rhythm section took some unusual liberties with the beat.

Switching to piano for You Don’t Understand Me and then a big acoustic guitar for Top Yourself, White presented himself as a constantly moving target. He banged a foot pedal placed on top of his amp with his hand to produce a stuttering effect on his guitar and sang at times into a second, heavily overdriven, microphone to produce a weirdly distorted vocal effect.

But Benson more than pulled his weight, supplying his wiry lead vocals to numbers including Old Enough and Many Shades of Black, as well as some bluesy slide guitar parts throughout.

The key influence, particularly on new songs such as Hold Up, was that of Led Zeppelin and, like the original British heavyweights, the Raconteurs brought a new, intelligent slant to an old, hard-rock aesthetic.

They closed the show proper with Blue Veins, a sensational slow blues in the fashion of Zeppelin’s Since I've Been Loving You, and then returned for several encores, including a mildly frantic version of Little Red Rooster, which bore scant resemblance to that of the Rolling Stones, let alone the Willie Dixon original. An immense, bluesy Carolina Drama brought the curtain down with a flourish.

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