It Might Get Loud (2008, Dir: Davis Guggenheim)

It Might Get Loud opens with a shot of Jack White, in his Sunday-best, stood in a cow barn. He nails a few pieces of wood together, places a screw at each end, and links them with an old guitar string. An old coke bottle is placed underneath the string as a makeshift bridge, and finally an old, beaten pickup is attached. He plugs the contraption into an amplifier and switches it on, loud and distorted. “See?” he asks the camera, as the resident cows walk away from the noise. “You don’t need a guitar...”

Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary might not win many awards, but it hits the spot with its intended audience and any guitarist or rock fan will love it from start to finish. I did have reservations about the choice of guitarists involved – surely Jimmy Page is in a completely different league than The Edge and Jack White, but I can see how replacing them with Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck would turn into a complete bore-fest. Instead, we get three very different guitarists from three eras of rock music: Jimmy Page, the genius behind Led Zeppelin; The Edge, the technical mastermind behind U2; and Jack White, one half of The White Stripes and member of The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather.

The film is loosely based around one meeting of the 3 men, bizarrely on a sound stage in a Hollywood studio, and is interspersed with segments of each guitarist in their own environment. Jack White plays with his son, in his Tennessee farmhouse; The Edge tinkers around his Dublin rehearsal space and visits his old school; and Jimmy Page walks around Headley Grange - the recording location for many classic Zeppelin albums.

As you would expect, there’s a lot of humour to be found in the film – mainly from Jack White, but also surprisingly from Jimmy Page. The one sequence where he plays air-guitar to Link Wray’s Rumble is worth the admission fee alone. Although The Edge comes across as the more serious and reflective of the three, even he shines throughout - pausing at one point to give an amusing demonstration of one of his riffs (the intro to Elevation) minus his guitar effects.

But the film is about the music – The Edge attempts to teach Page and White the chords to A Sort Of Homecoming (much to Page’s amusement when he refuses to accept one chord in the progression); Page plays the cyclical riff of Ramble On in his rehearsal space, a look of smug satisfaction creeping across his face; and White composes a song on the spot whilst being interviewed (Fly Farm Blues, slated to be his first solo release).

I didn’t want this film to end, but unfortunately it had to. Here’s to a TV series!