The White Stripes, Apollo, Manchester<br></br>Daryl Hall and John Oates, Ocean, London

Red and white and rocking all over

Even the cartoons are vintage. Before The White Stripes take the stage, the big screen shows an ancient episode of Felix, probably created in the same year as the last record Jack White bought. In a caper involving Felix, a professor and a wizard attempting to escape from the tower of a fairytale castle, the professor announces: "It's impossible with such primitive equipment." But of course, Felix has the last laugh.

I'd like to believe this is no coincidence. Jack and Meg White are two cool cartoon cats who insist on using only the most primitive equipment known to man – and time and time again they get away with it. The stage itself is a carefully colour-coded playroom: red carpet, red curtain, drum kit (with that red/white Campino mint swirl) on the left, keyboard (vintage, of course) on the right. The screen – the end credits having rolled for Felix – now shows a series of abstract artworks, all in a Mondrian style, all in red, black and white.

Then the players appear. First Meg, immaculate in red top and white trousers, her babyish pigtails now coiffed into a huge Ronettes hairdo. Then Jack, making a weird hunched, skulking walk-on in even weirder jeans: one leg red, one leg black. (In Wolverhampton the previous night, he'd slithered onstage like a snake on his belly, before popping up, Zebedee-like, to general amusement/ bemusement.) He perches on the edge of the drum stool for a few seconds, back-to-back with his – cough – big sister, blows one puff of magic cigarette smoke into the air, and he's away.

After ripping into "Black Math" from Elephant, the gets-better-with-every-listen new album, he breaks into a strange Elvis voice and sings, a cappella, something which google.com later proves to be "Take A Whiff On Me", a traditional song recorded by Woody Guthrie and The Byrds. This, of course, is The White Stripes live experience. Sure, you'll hear "the hits", but you'll also hear numerous obscure, unannounced cover versions which only a sharp ear, a fast pen and a good search engine can identify.

Tonight these include Screaming Lord Sutch's "Jack The Ripper", Public Nuisance's "Small Faces", Mazzy Star's "Five String Serenade" and Brendan Benson's "Good To Me", plus such established Stripes standards as Dolly Parton's "Jolene" (equal parts anguish and gayness) and Blind Willie McTell's "Lord Send Me An Angel" (that adapted line, "Mister Jack won't you be my man?" still gets the girls screaming).

There would be something geeky and nerdy about Jack's vintage-mania (his right-hand man, the white-labcoated techy who occasionally rushes on to fix a pedal, is Liam Watson, owner of Toerag Studios, where all the equipment is at least 40 years old) were the end results not so thrillingly, vitally now now now. Extremists and obsessives make the best music, even if you wouldn't trust them to be in charge of pop. In confusing times, sometimes tunnel vision is the only way forward.

Next it's the crowd-pleasing section: "You're Pretty Good Looking For A Girl" (Meg's personal favourite, Jack tells us), "Hotel Yorba" ... but after a verse, Jack drops his guitar, says "Let's do this properly" and leads Meg by the hand to the front of the stage. They sit on monitor wedges, and sing the whole thing a cappella, accompanied only by audience handclaps. It's wonderful.

"In The Cold Cold Night", Meg's showstopping solo, is punctuated by shouts of "Meg, will you marry me?" (sorry, couldn't help myself). The Cult Of Meg is big in Manchester: one girl, dressed identically to her heroine, dances wildly with two bouquets of red roses for drumsticks. She is escorted away.

"The Big Three Killed My Baby" gives the lie to Jack's claims to be apolitical ("I just sing about girls and being sad," he recently said): "Well I've said it before, Meg, but nothing's changed/ People are still burnin' for pocket change..." At the end of "Apple Blossom" – specifically the line "I think I'll marry you" – he glances meaningfully over at Meg. What's the consensus now, by the way? That they did, once upon a time, get married in a big cathedral by a priest? If so, some may ask why they needed to play games with us. But I enjoy the obfuscation. Like their clothes, their sketchy pasts make them yet more cartoon-like: symbols, ciphers, Stripe A and Stripe B. Reality? Truth? Fact? Who cares.

By the time he gets to "Do", one of many cuts from the first album, he's falling to his knees, lost in music. After a stomping "Astro", a little improvised bottleneck, "Jimmy The Exploder", and Son House's "People Grinning In Your Face", during which he throws his guitar to the floor and, Hendrix-like, conjures noises from it, they're gone.

There's no encore. "I just wanted to thank you all," Jack announces sheepishly when they reappear. "We wanted to play some more songs but there's a tight curfew and we can't. Sorry. I lost track of time."

Another white duo from a soul city with their own take on black music. I've gone out on a limb before – get me drunk and ask me about the Electric Light Orchestra – but Daryl Hall and John Oates, the most successful duo in America chart history (as Paul Gamba-cheesy reminds us beforehand) are so far beyond the critical pale they make ELO look like The Velvet Underground.

On the other hand, "M.E.T.H.O.D. Of Modern Love" was borrowed by The Wu, "I Can't Go For That" (of which we hear a full 15 minutes tonight) was sampled by De La Soul, and was one of a tiny handful of white records to top the US R&B chart, so perhaps I'm not so far out here.

Some of their oeuvre is patently OK-to-like: specifically the early, Abandoned Luncheonette stuff. "She's Gone" mimics the despair of heartbreak – at first so quiet it's hardly there, before building to a pillow-punching, hair-tearing screamy-fit – and is authentic Philly (Hall worked at Philadelphia Records, and sang backing for the Stylistics and Delfonics). But what I'm here for is the oft-derided Eighties stuff, like the Vice City-tastic "Maneater" and "Out Of Touch". It's pure shoulderpad pop lunacy, and it makes my year.

Oh, but how I used to hate them! Their uncool hair, their pushed-up sleeves (tonight it becomes apparent Hall only does this so he can play guitar properly), that moustache (birthday boy Oates has shaved it off now), their blankness. This, of course, was before their classic appearance on Brass Eye ("these are two photographs of the same paedophile"), and before I discovered an H&O calendar in which the pair morph, bizarrely, into ladyboys.

Age and time has withered my hatred, and indeed their audience (one grey-hair collapses on the stairs, paramedics are called, thankfully he's all right). If this was 1984 – and somewhere in my heart, it is – a new soul screamer like "Forever For You" would be blaring from car radios, amusement arcades, clothes shops and burger stalls. And you know what? I wouldn't mind at all.

s.price@independent.co.uk