Not many true guitar gods have walked this earth. In the hands of these rare beings, the guitar is more than a six stringed musical instrument; it is a source of immense power, a weapon of mass destruction, a light saber, the most magical of wands, capable of removing a groupy’s panties with a single note.

To be a guitar god, you have to be a lead guitarist. You have to be able to rip into a solo that slices through a song like a chainsaw through butter. Ideally you should be able to play a million notes a second, but some are able to sore equally as high with half as many notes. Clapton, Page and Hendrix spring to mind. In some ways these ones are the most special. They’re the ones that really make the guitar speak a language that we all understand, but don’t understand why. Speed demons like Van Halen, Randy Rhodes, Slash and Hammett boggle the mind; the aforementioned boggle the heart.

Guitar gods are what fighter pilots are to aviators. Bass players will always claim that the bass guitar is “cooler”, but deep down inside they know they’re just flying cargo planes, while the lead guitarists are pulling 3G inverted dives and vertical take-offs in their F14 Tomcats. Only the fighter pilots have a shot at being the Top Gun. It’s the same with lead guitarists. And let’s not even get into the fact that these men are caressing large phallic objects protruding from their crotches…

Other prerequisites of being a guitar god are that you have to have a repressed childhood, ideally with few social skills as a teenager, brought on by debilitating acne or late development, thus making practicing the guitar in your bedroom the most attractive means of killing time.

They’ve just released a compilation album called Gods of Guitar. On it you’ll find Keith Richards (Stones), Paul Kossoff (Free), Richy Blackmore (Deep Purple), Eric Clapton (Cream and Derek & The Dominoes), John Frusciante (Chilli Peppers), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) amongst others, making sweet love to their fret boards.

[Follow link for the rest of this review]

It’s great to tick a few of those boxes that need ticking in your iTunes library. You don’t have Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple? Weird. That’s like not having a toaster. It’s one of the greatest riffs ever written. Certainly the most iconic. Wild Thing by The Troggs? Done. Rebel Rebel by David Bowie, tick! Paranoid by Black Sabbath, Layla by Derek & the Dominoes, Who Are You by The Who, Ace of Spades by Motorhead, Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynrd. This is bread and butter stuff. Rock n’ roll 101. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t actually like some of these tracks, as an informed human being living on the planet earth, you must own these songs. Rules are rules. I don’t personally feel much for Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town, or You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by Bartman-Turner Overdrive, or Jessica by The Allman Brothers. I think of Castle ads when I hear them. But at least I can say it is an educated decision not to like these songs. I have them in my library, just in case I wake up from a coma one day and find them to be a wonderful soundtrack to the beginning of the rest of my life.

But look, like any compilation, this disc is not perfect. Nickelback, Bryan Adams, Fall Out Boy… WTF? There are also songs on here that make for good music but don’t necessarily belong on an album with this title. Beautiful Day by U2, Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones (another obligatory track for your library nevertheless), and perhaps the most ill fitting of all: When You Were Young by the Killers. However, none of these tracks will pollute your music collection irrevocably.

In conclusion, Gods of Guitar may feature some demigods of guitar, the occasional “nice enough bloke” of guitar and one or two absolute stinkers of guitar, but the majority of its track listing is taken up by bona fide gods of guitar. So if you’re the kind of guy or girl that has a thing for a face melting solo, and your music library has a few gaps, then this is not a bad way of filling those gaps. And if you’re just a beginner, then a compilation such as this is a great “gateway drug”, and may inspire you to delve deeper into the mysterious powers of rock n’ roll. You may even venture so far as to buy an entire Hendrix or Stones album. That, as they say, would really be something. On a final note, they say that the greatest guitar god of them all is, in fact, Jeff Beck.