David Bowie - "Battle for Britain"

David started playing guitar in the mid sixties. The first grown-up thing he ever learned to play on guitar was shown to him by Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin guitarist) when he was a session man. Bowie : "I was doing a session with one of the many bands that I had then. He showed me this riff - alternating F# barre chord to open E string, G chord to open E riff. I thought it was so cool ! I played it over and over. There's a certain enthusiasm of that moment when you learn to play something that never gets lost. It's become the core of who I am and what I do. Whenever I want to bring back that enthusiasm, I dust off that lick".

Bowie definitely wanted to get that enthusiasm back in the second half of the 90's. Bowie : "I used that same riff on "Battle For Britain", one of the first riffs I ever learned. It was just opening up that E string. That's made me so aware of keeping the E's open and taking the chords through it. And it was because of Page".

Available on the album "Earthling"