Music school offering guitar and bass lessons in Canary Wharf and Stratford on the classic track’s east London links and how to handle the hook
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In the first of a series of regular collaborations with Canary Wharf’s guitar school, Kitchen Jam, we take a look at the history of a track with a local link and deliver some tips on how to play it
- Kitchen Jam founder Darryl Powis has created a video tutorial to help Wharfers get their fingers around the riff that drives Rebel Rebel. Simply follow this link to get playing
- To play the whole track you’ll need the chords below:
looking back on the history of the track and its link to Docklands
BY ZAINAB HASSAN
Picture this – it’s early 1990, and David Bowie has just announced the Sound+Vision tour, a series of gigs where he’d play his biggest hits live for the very last time.
Rather than choose the setlist himself, he handed the decision to his global fanbase through telephone voting.
Dial 1-900-2-BOWIE-90 on your landline, and you were taking your chances at getting your favourite track onto the bill.
As calls flooded in from every corner of the globe, Bowie built the setlist from a mix of UK votes, American votes, and requests from everywhere else in between.
It was a truly global selection, curated to reflect what the world wanted to hear.
echoing on the island
For three nights that March, the tour landed in the capital at the London Arena, an indoor venue on the Isle Of Dogs that held up to 15,000 fans.
Demolished in 2006, the landscape is markedly different to when Bowie’s genre-shifting hits were last played, but the echoes of his riffs still resound in the hands of guitarists to this day.
glam rock swagger
The Sound+Vision tour setlist was shaped with deep cuts standing shoulder to shoulder with Bowie’s biggest hits.
One such song, Rebel Rebel, came early in the setlist. Salvaged from a scrapped Ziggy Stardust musical, it was the lead single for 1974 album Diamond Dogs and was the last of Bowie’s singles to swagger with true glam rock bravado.
Deceptively simple, yet roaring with a Rolling Stones-esque ferocity, the main riff loops around three chords – D, A and E – and an unrelenting descending melody that’s as instantly singable as it is impossible to shake.
the end of two eras
As a swan song to glam rock, Rebel Rebel was the end of an era for Bowie.
The Sound+Vision tour was the end of another, as he retired the hits from his live sets for good.
Two farewells, made decades apart, overlapped for three nights at the London Arena.
But all these memories remain in music. Just listen to that rebellious opening riff – it all comes flooding back.
- For those who’d like to know more, east London is also now home to the David Bowie Centre in Stratford.
Based at the V&A East Storehouse, the collection includes more than 90,000 items from the artist’s archive and is free to visit.
key details: Kitchen Jam
Kitchen Jam offers guitar lessons rooted in musical connection and community from its studios in Canary Wharf and Stratford.
Follow this link to find out how to book a free trial session
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