The song David Bowie wrote to piss Mick Jagger off: “I’ve got this riff”
It’s rare that David Bowie‘s originality is ever questioned. The mercurial rock star is historically famed for being creatively elusive, regularly jumping ahead of the curve to inform music fans of the oncoming music trends they can enjoy.
Be it 1960s folk in the early, schoolboy Bowie years, the experimental rock that shifted into jazz-fusion come the mid-1970s, or even disco with his timeless number one, 1983’s ‘Let’s Dance’, he regularly shapeshifted through genres to become the epitome of originality. So when flicking back through the history books of rock and roll, his name is regularly cited not as a pillar of influence, and not someone desperately scraping at the ideas of his contemporaries.
However, of all the people he has confessed to copying, it’s surprising to hear Mick Jagger’s name being mentioned. Of course, Jagger is iconic in his own right, but represents the sort of traditional sense of rock and roll that Bowie rebelled against, and in the almost brotherly relationship that the two shared, it often felt like Bowie was the one teasing Jagger with his superiority.
Nevertheless, he’s openly confessed that his 1972 hit ‘The Jean Genie’ was inspired by The Rolling Stones, and their rough and ready-to-go guitar riffs. But then, two years later, on his record Diamond Dogs, Bowie decided to go one step further and deliberately take influence from The Stones as a means of pissing Jagger off. Where he respected the imitation of ‘The Jean Genie’ as a means of flattery, there was no mistaking that ‘Rebel Rebel’ was a tongue-in-cheek follow-up.
Alan Parker, who played guitar on ‘Rebel Rebel’, as well as a string of other songs on Diamond Dogs, remembered, “He said, ‘I’ve got this riff, and it’s a bit Rolling Stonesy, I just want to piss Mick off a bit’,” adding, “I spent about three-quarters of an hour to an hour with him working on the guitar riff; he had it almost there, but not quite.”
He continued to explain, “We got it there, and he said, ‘Oh, we’d better do a middle…’ So he wrote something for the middle, put that in. Then he went off and sorted some lyrics. And that was us done.”
‘Rebel Rebel’ certainly had echoes of The Rolling Stones, but in true Bowie fashion, he elevated it to a point where he made it his own, which is ironic, because he has since confessed that the original riff itself wasn’t the brainchild of his creativity but rather a shared piece of music that did the rounds amongst burgeoning London musicians.
He explained, “When I was in high school, that was the riff by which all of us young guitarists would prove ourselves in the local music store. It’s a real air guitar thing, isn’t it?”
There’s no record of whether or not Bowie succeeded in his aim of pissing Jagger off, but I would hazard a guess that it got slightly under his skin. Such was the competitive landscape of the ego-fuelled rock and roll song that whenever anyone came out with a hit as triumphant as ‘Rebel Rebel’, it would have had the other clenching their fist.
