Karen Elson: Gothic Romance

'I've lived a surreal life,' says Karen Elson, 31, shaking her head of radioactive red hair in disbelief. She's gone from a working-class family in Oldham, via supermodel stardom that billed her as the world's most beautiful freak, to Nashville, Tennessee, where she has settled with her rock-star husband, Jack White of The White Stripes, and their two children, Scarlett, four, and Henry Lee, two. And in true Nashville style, she's now forging a music career, releasing a folk album

She has had what she calls a Wizard of Oz life: 'Oldham was a grey factory town. Manchester was 15 miles away and felt like another world. A lot of the mills and factories were abandoned or closing down. I didn't know I was going to model, but I knew I was going to do anything to get out. For my sanity.' Her father was a joiner, her mother a housewife, and they divorced when Karen and her twin sister Kate were seven. 'As a teenager, I didn't really have a lot of people who I looked at and thought, "Wow, I want to be you."'

The Madchester music scene was something her two older half-brothers were part of, but 'by the time I went to The Hacienda, the glory days were distant memories and the casualties were building up'. Aged 15, she watched PJ Harvey's Glam-Gothic video for 'Down By the Water'. She went straight out and bought the album, which she listened to on her Walkman under the covers at night. She kept her ambitions quiet 'because I didn't want to challenge anybody and have them come down on me like a ton of bricks and crush my dreams'. The school careers adviser wasn't much help. 'I told them all my grand ideas and they said, "That's not going to happen." ' Since she wanted to travel, they suggested she should become an air hostess. She hoots with laughter. 'Which was the last thing I wanted to do!'

From an early age, she had problems with food, suffering from anorexia and bulimia, which she dates back to her parents' divorce. 'I couldn't express what I was feeling so I acted it out through food.' At school she was considered too skinny. In fact, her album's title, The Ghost Who Walks, was, she tells me, 'one of my nicer nicknames at school'. During athletics, kids used to shout 'starving whippet' from the sidelines; she bought 'get fat' cookery books and tried to build herself up. Then, when she went to Manchester on work experience, her skinny frame became an asset: she was recruited by a Hugo Boss modelling scout.

'The day I left school, I was out. I was 16. I remember walking out the door and thinking, "I am never coming back." And I never did.' Neither did her twin, who's a model and film-maker in New York. She's smaller in stature than Karen, and still has the mousy brown hair they were born with. They keep in touch, doing work-out classes together via Skype. 'She's brilliant and really successful,' says Karen.

Karen was doing well as an ingénue model, with a Paris Vogue cover and a contract promoting Clinique Happy, until she met the photographer Steven Meisel. He convinced her to shave her eyebrows and dye her hair an unholy red, and an unconventional icon was born. In 1997, she was on the cover of The Face, Vogue Italia and Elle, and as 2000 approached, her unreal, futuristic look was very much of the moment. In France she was called 'Le Freak (très chic)' and Karl Lagerfeld made her the face of Chanel, dubbing her 'a beauty for the new millennium'.

In her late teens, she filled out a bit. This meant her size, again, was at fault. A stylist told her to lose weight; Dolce and Gabbana turned her away from their catwalk in Milan because she couldn't fit into samples. She publicly denounced the 'power trips' of weight fascists in fashion. Secretly, while living in New York, she was practising rituals of starvation, vomiting and laxative abuse. It wasn't simply a way of keeping her job but the expression of a deeper psychic wound. 'I used my job to justify my eating disorder,' she has said in the past. 'If you're really good at numbing your hunger, you can mask your emotional pain as well.' Her wake-up call came in 2000 when her boyfriend of two years died of a heroin overdose, and she sought help from a therapist. Today, she looks healthy and beautiful, and she doesn't want to talk about food issues, although you sense these things are never straightforward for her. She checks that her falafel and hummus are dairy-free, saying passionately, 'I do not drink milk.'

The pain that shimmers so melodically through her album starts to make more sense. The title track, 'The Ghost Who Walks', is a story about a man who kills his woman because he no longer loves her ('My dear, he softly spoke, our love had died'); a perfect metaphor for how it feels to be dumped. 'You walk around haunted for a while when you've had your heart broken, don't you?' she says. 'I think every woman has felt loss and heartbreak, and I'd rather write about that [universal] feeling than go into detail about my experience. Eight years ago, someone broke my heart – who cares? I'd rather do what the Nick Caves and PJ Harveys do: turn it into a murder ballad.'

In New York she was drawn to the burlesque troupe The Citizens Band, a diverse group of aerialists, singers and 'rascals from all walks of life'. Quixotic, fashion-fabulous and politic-ally right-on, they put on original shows such as The Trepanning Opera (a Weill/Brecht-inspired satire on the US healthcare system) and their fans include the fashion designer and creative director of Lanvin, Alber Elbaz, and American Vogue's creative director Grace Coddington. Karen was cast as 'a lovesick albino' in her first public singing gig. 'I was terrified at first but then you couldn't get me off the stage.'

And so it was, in June 2005, that she was cast in a White Stripes video, Blue Orchid, as a tottering maiden in fetish shoes, who, after a lot of whinnying, was ravished by a white horse. On the set she met Jack White, the lead singer and guitarist of the band (the only other member, the drummer Meg White, was Jack's ex-wife) which with its pared-down intense rock and blues electrified the music scene, the album Elephant winning two Grammys. She knew his music already – 'of course' – and he knew her face? 'I guess he did,' she says shyly. 'Our life sounds so wild on the outside, but ultimately, we're both pretty solid people with our feet planted on the ground and we try to help one another. He's been such an encouragement to me. He always has been, even when I was modelling. It's a wonderful characteristic he has: he doesn't judge. What I do is just what I do and he's proud of it.'

They were married in the Amazon Basin, by a shaman, at the confluence of three rivers. 'Jack was performing a gig in Manaus, at the opera house,' she explains. Was the wedding spontaneous or planned? 'That's a long story, a very long story' Meg (who was married to Jack between 1996 and 2000 and is now the wife of Jackson Smith, son of Patti Smith) was the maid of honour; the ring, which sits like a black button on Karen's long pale hand, was a vintage cocktail ring. 'Onyx and diamond,' she says.

They chose Nashville as a good place to bring up their children. 'It's lush and green, almost like the English countryside. We live in nature; we've got a lake and we go for a lot of tough hikes.' They spend warm evenings on their porch watching the sun go down, and there's a recording studio at the bottom of the garden, where she made her album, channelling local spirits Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette. 'There's definitely something about living in Nashville It's a strange, haunted place. Music is everywhere. You get a taxi from the airport and the driver will start playing you his demo tape. Once we had a barmy one who got out his harmonica on the motorway and started playing it with both hands off the wheel. It's strange because I'm a Northern girl so I shouldn't fit in, but it's the first place that's really felt like home.'

Always a vintage-clothes junkie, she collects dresses 'as some people collect paintings. They hang on my walls sometimes.' For her 30th birthday party she wore a 1970s black pleated lace jumpsuit. Ironically for a model who has helped sell Yves Saint Laurent, Prada and Burberry, she admits, 'I like old things better than buying new things.' In London she loves Virginia, the vintage shop in Holland Park, and she has acquired a boutique in Nashville called Venus and Mars. It was her favourite shop in town and when it was in danger of closing, she 'begged' the owner to go into business with her. 'I said. "I have an attic full of clothes I don't want any more, let's join forces." ' They barely break even – the recession has hit Tennessee hard – 'but I think it would be pretentious if I was selling things no one else could afford. We have a special room upstairs where it's gorgeous big pouffy dresses, but mainly we try to keep things affordable because this is Nashville, you know?'

Country and Western came out of the last Great Depression, and in that tradition, Karen's album is full of Dust Bowl references and incantations against exploitative 'men in suits'. Her inspirations included Dorothea Lange's photographs, Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and a history of the Great Depression called The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. 'And then the whole Bernie Madoff scandal happened. I just felt, "God, you could go to the bank and there could be nothing, everything you worked for could be gone."'

Perhaps there is some continuity between her working-class childhood, those abandoned Lancashire mills and her new home in Tennessee. I don't believe Karen will ever take anything for granted. 'Of course I'm lucky. Being a model and being married to Jack are great in so many ways. But they also put me off recording my album because I just thought, "What's the point? People are never going to take me seriously." Every time I picked up the guitar I always felt like there were 50 things I should be doing instead. That was where Jack really encouraged me to get into the studio. He was sick of me playing songs in hiding and not letting anyone else hear them.'

And her children were, in their way, helpful, too. 'If your kid is screaming, you'll sing anything to shut them up.' One track on her album, 'The Last Laugh', started out as a lullaby. 'They call it the "hush little darling" song. But they love Jack's music more than anything else. They love The Dead Weather [the band recently formed by White with Alison Mosshart of The Kills] who have been through the house recording a lot.' Images of flame-haired tots moshing round the garden spring to mind, strong like their mother and strange like their father. A photo of them suddenly arrives on her phone and Karen's face is a picture of happiness, hard-won.

The Ghost Who Walks is out on 25 May