When was the last time a new band blew you away with the sheer invention and audacity of their guitar playing? I mean really blew you away... I'm struggling with this one myself. Guitar heroes still walk among us, though they are exclusively of the superannuated variety (note the recent veneration of Jimmy Page and Johnny Marr) and the only plausible challenger to the old guard, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, is closer to 40 than 30. Whither the singular young lead guitarist?

Four decades after Hendrix, things have backslid to an alarming degree; the flaming plectrum of innovation lost down the back of rock's generic sofa. Every other band now sounds like the Gang Of Four, their Andy Gill-inspired guitars as brittle as shattered glass--a sound that was daringly new and truly unique in 1978. Thirty years later it's become merely gestural--an echo of an echo. New bands like Foals and Vampire Weekend are widely trumpeted for leavening their non-specific indie rock with vaguely African guitar figures, putting them right up there with Humberside journeymen Red Guitars, circa 1984. God bless ‘em for having a go, but it's hardly Remain In Light, is it? King Sunny Adé's not losing any sleep.

For so long the guitar was the tyro's rapier, consistently slashing back yesterday's dead wood and carving new, outrageous shapes for the rock song to inhabit. It's been that way since Les Paul first patented the magnetic coil pick-up and Link Ray conjured distortion by slashing his amplifier with a jack knife. Subsequently, the medium has been defined by successive generations of axe-wielders whose raison d'être was to drag the guitar kicking and screaming (with feedback) into tomorrow. Hence, in the UK a genealogy rises like a river out of Hank Marvin and Lonnie Donegan, becoming a torrent with Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Mick Ronson, Dave Gilmour et al, then meandering delightfully through Phil Manzanera, Mick Jones, Wilko Johnson, Andy Gill, Vini Reilly, Maurice Deebank, The Edge, Johnny Marr, John Squire, Graham Coxon and Kevin Shields before, the odd Greenwoodian tributary notwithstanding, apparently drying up.

Similarly, in the US, Les Paul and Chet Atkins begat Scotty Moore and Link Wray, then Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Roger McGuinn, Robbie Robertson and Jerry Garcia who in turn ushered in Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Thurston Moore, Peter Buck, Kurt Cobain; then... zilch. And for all the recent revivification of folk, the acoustic guitar is still waiting for a challenger to (not merely an adroit simulacrum of) Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, John Fahey or Leo Kottke.

Does all this point to a more endemic malaise? Is rock music drifting inexorably toward the de-clawed fate of bebop? Is the guitar--like the tenor saxophone, once a miraculous conduit of hipster cool and radical free expression--in danger of becoming chronically sanitised and about as unpredictable as a banjo in a Dixieland jazz band?

Emergent guitarists, consider the gauntlet thrown down...

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