It Might Get Loud (PG). Running time: 94 minutes. Director: David Guggenheim. Starring. Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White
This is a film about the electric guitar. It unites three of the instrument's most prolific proponents of the past four decades. While they may share a musical instrument of choice, three more diverse musicians you could hardly hope to find.
Jimmy Page, lead guitarist of 1960s and '70s English heavy metal pioneers Led Zeppelin, seems to draw his gift from a divine conduit. The former session musician reflects that, with 'the Zep', he relished the freedom to build and accelerate towards an ethereal aural plateau. If rock music is spiritual, somewhere between sex and prayer, then he is its pope.
The Edge is described as a sonic architect. As lead guitarist of Irish rock band U2 for more than 30 years, he layers simple chords with myriad guitar effects, so that each song sounds subtly or strikingly different; stark, shimmering or sublime. A guitar tech enthuses that during a set of 36 songs, The Edge might not use the same guitar sound twice.
With due respect to The Edge, Jack White, frontman of 2000s American indie bands The White Stripes and The Raconteurs, says technology is the enemy of creativity. He is a musical mole, burrowing into history, dragging back his favourite blues influences, and spreading them, still muddy, across his backyard. At the start of the film, White is shown constructing a rudimentary guitar from a lump of wood, a glass bottle and a length of wire. To him, less equals pure.
It Might Get Loud gathers these three diverse talents, and their guitars, in a warehouse, where, both together and apart, they reflect upon their backgrounds, their influences, their evolution as musicians, and, most importantly, their philosophies about music itself.
This is not a chronology, although there are scraps of history. We see the high school notice board that famously drew the members of U2 together, and the concrete platform in the schoolyard that was their first stage. We visit Headley Grange, the Victorian homestead in East Hampshire, England, whose acoustics lent a distinctive sound to the recording of Led Zeppelin's fourth album.
And we revisit the sources of seminal songs, such as the political violence in Northern Ireland that inspired The Edge to write 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'. White, in silent awe, plays us a recording of his own favourite song, a stark