Guitars, groupies, gurus: The extraordinary life of Jimmy Page

Chris Salewicz pulls out all the stops to emphasise this is no ordinary rock biog; this is a Jimmy Page biog, this is one louder, one bigger, one nastier, but the rock god title is for the reader to decide, says Sam Boland

It's become standard practice for the biographies of legendary hellraisers to open with a dropped intro, a little vignette of devilment and debauchery to whet the reader’s appetite, a sign of the good stuff to come, a promise that it’ll be worth plodding through the opening chapter or two set in Nowheresville, Ohio, or post-war, bombed-out London, as our hero shucks corn to pay for acting lessons or collects scrap iron to swap for guitar strings.